How high will Microsoft fly? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly?

MSFT 480.82

+0.6%

Dec 4 3:59 PM EST

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To: ToySoldier who wrote (8898)	7/2/1998 3:48:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (3) of 74651

When the medium to larger businesses realize that NT cannot be used for NT solutions (as was promoted and promised by MSFT marketing people) they will scale back the usage of NT or rip it all back out all together I was one of those who did this. At a previous point in my career I was responsible for a substantial rework of several key MVS systems. Our team did the original prototype on Sun servers (the clients were windows). The prototype worked fine. The production phase of this was to be rolled out on NT servers, but as we headed into the final stress testing it became obvious that NT was just not ready to carry the load, and that there were also unworkable administration problems which would have forced unacceptable downtime even if the systems did not fail in normal use. We switched back to Unix, although the production servers were HP 9000 systems rather than Sun. MSFT still has a long way to go to achieve the level of reliability and capability to tackle those jobs. But it would be a mistake to think that they will not address the problem eventually, or that their revenue plans count on that market any time soon. There has been ample evidence in the press and quoted on this thread that says they will move gradually in that direction, with the real penetration still several years in the future. So as an investor, the question is do they understand the implications of that strategy on their short term corporate growth and financial health (I think the answer is yes) and will they be able to sustain good growth going forward over a 5 year period (and again I think the answer is yes). Therefore, the discussion about how ready they are to tackle the enterprise today has little impact on the value of MSFT as an investment. BTW the answer to that one is NOT (yet), IMO. If market-share were not an issue and only technical superiority was If you have followed my posts here and on other threads, you would know that I agree with this point in general. Not only do other companies have technically superior products, but in many cases the most technically strong MSFT product internal development is not the one that makes it to market. Although as a user of all three systems (MAC, Win9X and NT) I would say that technically NT is generally superior on most points over the broadest range of use. Microsoft's business model is not built on having the most technically strong product. I do believe that investing in a company that puts market success ahead of technical excellence will pay better than the reverse.

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