Bill,
Thanks. It's true that it does take a great deal of searching to find these reports on the wire services.
I agree with you completely on Win98: it constitutes an incremental improvement over Win95, without the compatibility issues of the Win 3.1 to 95 transition. Further, it is required to support a number of new PC hardware features. As such, it will ship in place of Win95 on virtually all the systems that formerly would have shipped with Win95. In addition, Microsoft's new subscription model, although more focused on Win/NT, may also speed the replacement of Win95 with Win98 on existing systems at businesses.
Note also that Microsoft has set a goal for itself for FY98 to "increase its Internet Explorer market share to 70 to 80 percent of the browser market. [See news.com ] Considering the existing IE base (over 30% by Microsoft's measurements), huge OEM sales of Win98 (plus ISP and other sources) must be assumed in order for this aggessive goal to be achievable. Clearly, Microsoft must have projected a very rapid switchover to Win98.
Of course, although Win98 will be a vehicle for furthering Microsoft's control of the critical interfaces of the future, the boost to FY98 results will not be comparable to the boost it got originally from Win95. Rather, I believe it will be the continued rapid adoption of NT that will provide the biggest "surprise" in FY98 results. Businesses will not be waiting for NT 5.0, but rather will continue to standardize desktops and low-to-midrange servers on NT 4.0, upgrading to 5.0 when it becomes available, courtesy of the new subscription pricing model. The effect on earnings will be magnified by the much higher margins for the NT platforms, combined with associated BackOffice sales.
As with all transitions, the rate at which this will occur is by no means certain. However, with Microsoft's recent announcement to "recommend" that business use NT and that Memphis follow-ons would have a common code base with NT, I would expect the very high growth rates of NT to continue in the current fiscal year. Since this would be from the much higher base that now exists, the effect on earnings commensurately should be much more substantial than in FY97. And they won't hide all of it, either.
So, it appears they will need even more U-Hauls. :-)
IMHO
Best regards,
Arno |
