Very interesting, but I wonder about several of the items in your analysis.
1. Your profits for Netscape are awfully optomistic. $113M is way too high for a company growing as fast as Netscape. Any such company will have lots of expenses finding and training people, and opening offices, ... that will tend to keep profit down.
2. You are extremely optomistic on Microsoft meeting dates. Recent experience says otherwise, and many of the items you are mentioning are slipping. In particular, the 64-bit version of NT has probably already slipped out of '97. Further, the capabilities of SQL Server are a lot less than is knowledgeable to the general public. Microsoft is basing it on the version 4.9 code that they bought from Sybase. This is more than 3 years old. They cannot make that up overnight. For example, SQL Server 6.5 has a 200G capacity limit (based on Microsoft press releases). They will not pass 1T until their next major release scheduled for next year. Compare this to the multi-terabyte systems already deployed by Oracle and Informix.
3. I wonder what the real split on sales for Netscape is between browser and server software. I had heard that their server sales were growing extremely rapidly, especially for office intranets.
4. Microsoft is behind on O-O DB support. It is unclear when SQL Server will have any such support. Informix/Illustra is already shipping an ORDBMS with a Web DataBlade, that was the basis for the 24 Hours in Cyberspace demo (and several more recent ones), and is the basis of several very interesting web sites. Oracle just announced their "web cartridge" which claims to have similar capabilities. ODI and other OODBMS are also being considered for some such web sites. In contrast, Microsoft seems to be quite behind in this area. The closest they have come is the press release saying that they plan a 1T DB built on the next release showing a lot of pretty pictures.
I notice that you question properly some of the Netscape projections. I also know that Microsoft is quite carnivorous. However, I do believe that there are plenty of holes in the "slide show" that they are giving on future directions, and that these need to be examined closely. |
