How high will Microsoft fly? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly?

MSFT 472.22

-1.3%

3:59 PM EST

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To: Valley Girl who wrote (35028)	12/2/1999 1:06:00 PM
From: Stormweaver	Read Replies (1) of 74651

Good points. Your right that iron cost is just one aspect of "solution cost". Looking at the big picture, any business wants the most cost performing solution that meets the risk/other requirements of the project/application they are involved in. Speaking of your web examples, AMZN, EBAY and friends run their business on a box - when they're box is down they're entire business is down. IMHO when you business is on a box there is no choice but to go with the solution that gives you 99.9% uptime; currently that is mainframe(s). Anything else and your rolling dice with your business. FWIH Charles Schwabb runs it's online trading primarily on mainframes with some front-end AIX boxes; that's a company that understands business risk! I contend that as we evolve in software development to a true distributed model (with help from ever growing bandwidth, supporting software, and cheapness of powerful small iron (2-8 way)) that the most cost performing and resilient solution will be the 100+ small machines versus 1-10/20 big machine config. In theory if a box fails I unplug it and plug in a new box - my administration costs go down since all I need is someone to watch a "monitor" and when a box fails plug in a new box; again ideally. Performance wise n-small machines have already beaten mainframes in pure computational tests; ie. Beowolf clusters. I agree that Msft needs to continue with Java simply because it is what developers want to use - they can't afford to lose developer interest right now. As a business with a Java application I will select the hardware/OS vendor that bests runs my application. Therefore if w2k runs it the fastest and is the most stable I'll go with that. As a result, the platform independance of Java is actually a double edge sword - there is no guarantee of iron sales just because Sun developed it. Just IMHO of course. Cheers James

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