How high will Microsoft fly? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly?

MSFT 492.01

+1.3%

Nov 28 9:30 AM EST

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To: Dave who wrote (57702)	4/28/2001 8:14:20 AM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (2) of 74651

Re: Non-events With something like 120 million new PCs being shipped annually (and still growing) it's difficult to see how one can characterize a product which will immediately capture 80%+ of that market as a "non-event". The consumer market may not be fixated on the inner workings of an OS but vastly improved stability will be very welcome by all. There are two ways to view the crash-prone nature of XP's predecessors in the consumer space. The first is that consumers "don't care". Well, if consumers really didn't care then the argument that other OSes are more stable would be irrelevant from a marketing standpoint. However, if consumers do care then the arrival of XP simply makes that potential competitive differentiator go away and further entrenches the Windows desktop franchise. There's a much bigger reason why XP is hugely important, however. One of the major drivers of corporate PC upgrades is employees who simply want to use the same systems at home and work. When Windows 95 started showing up on home systems in the mid 90s, most companies were still running Windows 3.11. Employee pressure was a huge motivator for corporate laggards to bring their systems up to currency. The same will be true for XP. While Windows 2000 is beginning to make real inroads on leading corporate desktops there are still huge numbers of companies standardized on Windows 98 or Windows 95. I had dinner with a VP friend from a major life insurance company last weekend and was surprised when he mentioned that they only run Windows 95 on desktops--actually replacing Windows 98 with Windows 95 when new PCs are shipped to their IT group before deploying them. As home users adopt XP they'll again want the same "look and feel" at work as they have at home and this will be a huge motivator for laggard companies to ditch their Windows 95 systems and upgrade to XP on the corporate side. This impact on MSFT's bottom line will be far from a "non event" over the next several years.

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