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Technology Stocks : CheckFree Holdings Corp. (CKFR), the next Dell, Intel? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Benny Baga who wrote (6669)	6/23/1999 8:28:00 AM
From: Rob C.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20297

BB, I was being facetious with regard to my post this morning. I still believe Checkfree will prevail. They don't have a viable product to market yet. What this does do is turn up the heat a bit on Mr. Kight, which I feel is a good thing for us shareholders. Regards, Rob

To: Benny Baga who wrote (6669)	6/23/1999 10:17:00 AM
From: axp	Respond to of 20297

There's something fishy in the prominence (25% of the text) given to the fact that this system will be implemented on Sun computers and includes several quotes from Scott McNealy. Mainly, why is this relevant? These banks don't need a price break from Sun in return for the promo - the hardware costs are the least of their problems. All through the recent system problems at CKFR the computing platform wasn't mentioned (at least in the stories I read). Transpoint doesn't advertise that its system is cobbled together using hundreds of Compaq PCs running NT. I think they've got a bad case of portal-envy. Do they think that the association with Sun makes them seem more internet-savvy? Are they paranoid about Transpoint and did McNealy convince them (never missing a chance to bash MS) that it took Transpoint so long to get operational BECAUSE they tried to use PCs for a job that requires big iron. There was also talk about how this system will be "open" where all the other ones are "proprietary". Yet there was no mention of support for any standards. Standards are hard to work out and hard to live with - and most systems that claim to be open are only open if you are on the inside. In the OS business, "open" can often be translated as "Unix" under the reasoning that with Unix it's possible to get a clue about what's going on inside since some versions of Unix source code are freely available. I'd bet that most of these banks bread and butter systems are running big batch oriented IBM systems. Where will they find the small army of Unix/financial software gurus who can get this system running? In my experience, IBM IT departments are suspicious of outside groups attempting to interoperate with the mainframe and don't always offer full cooperation - all agreements aside.