I don't agree Bob. I seriously doubt that we need a crash kit now, but of course, I am never sure. More likely, the negative news is priced into the stock. There is an outside possibility that Microsoft will surprise, but with John Conners as CFO it's hard to tell how/if he manages market perception. If it were Greg Maffei, I wouldn't be surprised to see some nice upside. With John, the current spate of articles could be partially due to analysts accurately picking up on his demeanor. We won't know until this afternoon. Of course, if the execs are overly negative on the conference call, we could see another drop, but to me, the downside looks limited to $70 or so.
As far as a long term crash kit... I think you'd better get one for Sun. Microsoft has a much more complete vision for the Internet, and I believe they will soon (within 1-2 years) be the default platform used for developing and deploying Internet services. While the Sun/Oracle marketing machines are weakening in their ability to successfully FUD, Microsoft and Windows 2000 have already addressed a lot of the things that used to be legitimate issues with their Internet and data servers. They've also finally gone public on the .net strategy and are doing incredible work towards implementing an integrated device through server/services solution. Products will be available over the next year that incorporate .net technologies, and if the recent PDC, one of the best if not the best in Microsoft's history, is any indicator, Microsoft is coming back, big time. In fact, there were a fair number of people from Sun hanging around the Microsoft PDC passing out EJB software etc. Not only were the attendees generally uninterested in Sun's freebies, there was a fair amount of attendee backlash against Sun for the inaccurate FUD that is now being exposed as such. I don't think a single person, competition or otherwise, at the PDC had any question about the innovation inherent in Microsoft's .net initiative.
Even if Sun's PE simply normalizes as people realize that their recent growth was anomolous and enhanced by coordinated business and legal efforts to injure or hold back Sun's competition, it's a long way down.
JMHO of course,
Mike |
