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inspired question: what if MS got liquidated? | by jaqie | 2009-04-02 14:21:33 |
| Depends what you mean by liquidated |
by basher20 |
2009-04-02 14:56:04 |
Typically that means that the assets of the company get auctioned off to others, and the cash raised goes first to pay off any debts of the organizations, and then the remainder gets divvied up on a per-share basis.
The interesting thing in this case is that there probably isn't a current software company in the industry that is both solvent enough to purchase the rights to Windows and not already enjoined by anti-trust laws and settlements from buying it.
This means that wither a new entity would need to be created to make the purchase, or else an existing company would have to take on a tremendous amount of debt to make the purchase. Either way, the biggest revenue stream for the new company would be the same upgrade licensing path that we have now: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Now if instead you mean what would happen if MS were to just shut down the company, lay off all the programmers, and place the copyrights and patents into the public domain, the results would be different. The most likely outcome is that the programmers would reorganize into new companies that would each try to capture that maintenence and upgrade stream.
The competition would likely result in multiple different and intentionally incompatible versions of the software. Whether or not this would be a good thing or not would depend on how agressively each new company decided to work out the whole prioe/quality/innovation/compatibility equation.
I really don't think the government would step in at all, except to protect it's own installed base. |
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Maybe not one company to buy it as a whole. (n/t) | by ripley8 | 2009-04-02 15:24:40 |
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