Hmmm... I think it should have been "market", not "technology", but let's have a look at it anyway:
- I haven't seen any product from MSFT in the wireless world, yet. Wireless products are either help for stationary technology or something, like WAP, where MSFT has no say. I've seen one phone with a MSFT logo, but it was made by Nokia...
- MSFT has made no TCP/IP/Internet related products that generate earnings. What most people forget, is that Cisco is in reality selling software, not hardware. Well, you buy hardware from cisco, but it's the software inside, that makes the difference. How many black boxes running your ethernet has the name MSFT on it?
- If you go full duplex ethernet 100Mbps twisted pair on Windows 95/98/NT4/2000, the software goes bananas if you get too hard a load. If you switch to half duplex, speed can increase up to 100 times. I didn't believe the transfer rates of 8kbyte/sek. on a 100Mbps network until some IBM and CISCO technicians explained the full duplex problem to me. Linux just runs at full speed all the time. The problem lies in the NBT implementation. There's no problem in the hardware - everything runs perfectly on MacOS, Linux and others, it's MSFT that introduces the problem. Their main product is obviously not made by people with great knowledge in TCP/IP.
- As far as I see, database technology is mainly generating earnings by selling consulting hours and training. Oracle masters this very well. The difference between MS SQL and Oracle is, that when the customer wants quicker responses than 2 minutes for a customer lookup, the Oracle guys can do something about it... If you look at the market capitalization of Oracle and the market capitalization value of the MS SQL server division of Microsoft, then it should be obvious, that MSFT is not a leader.
Crypto-technology is many different things, like PGP, Verisign authentification etc. I've never had an ActiveX object signed by something else than a Verisign certificate. And I've never trusted any encryption that was made by Microsoft. Encryption is a key parameter for trust in software in future markets, and when you look at lostpassword.com, MSFT does not equal trustworthyness. Especially the NT4 password cracking program is cute. For MSFT, I hope there will not be a Win2000 version of that program.
I know that MSFT is still going strong, but when you look at PE values, a PE of 57 seems pretty good to me right now. It's even better than Intels. |
