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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: johnd who wrote (25946)	7/13/1999 2:18:00 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Microsoft is beginning to dominate performance zdnet.com By John Taschek, PC Week July 11, 1999 9:03 PM PT Just 10 years ago, MS-DOS was the market-leading OS. You never saw Microsoft and enterprise mentioned together in the same month, much less in the same sentence. My, how times have changed. Three years ago, Microsoft hosted an Enterprise Day in which it announced a strategy to pump up its enterprise software and reap some of the rewards found in higher-priced, higher-margin enterprise-class products. People scoffed at the very idea. "With what?" they asked. Now the world faces a different reality. Microsoft doesn't give up. It has been ramping up its arsenal by hiring top-tier personnel. Some of the best people from Digital, Tandem and Borland/Inprise, just to name a few, are now working for Microsoft. And the strategy is paying off. This week, PC Week Labs reports that Microsoft dominated an independent Web application server test, conducted by testing company Doculabs. The results show that Microsoft so dominated the test--in terms of price and performance--that it looks downright embarrassing for the competitors. This is amazing given that three years ago Microsoft was criticized for not having an Internet strategy. The Microsoft solution cannot be directly compared with solutions from the other application server vendors, which ran their tests on a series of Unix systems. For example, Doculabs could have run Solaris on Intel boxes, which would have lowered the overall cost. But does it matter? Doculabs' strategy was to test all-out performance, and the million-dollar-plus Sun equipment that Doculabs incorporated should have been adequate. It certainly was more expensive than the half-dozen Compaq four-way Xeons Microsoft used. This brings up issues on why there's still a need for application server vendors. These vendors provide additional functionality over Microsoft's purely platform-based solution. But those aimed at the NT market don't have to reinvent the wheel by developing the app server engine itself. It's done. It's cooked--get over it. Microsoft wins. Microsoft also nailed a spot on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's Top 10 list of pure performance leaders. To be clear, this is a transaction test, and NEC was running the test with Oracle and not with Microsoft's SQL Server, which has been averaging upward of 25,000 transactions per minute. The NEC/NT scenario pumped out a whopping 50,000-plus transactions per minute. But this TPC test shows that, in theory, NT can reach the peak speeds found in the once-untouchable Unix arena, and that NT isn't necessarily the bottleneck that many thought it was. Microsoft does have a weakness, however. Sun, IBM, Compaq, Sequent and Hewlett-Packard all have non-NT systems at the top of the TPC charts and perform about twice as fast as any of the Microsoft entries. Sun even has one system that beats NT on both price and performance, showing that Sun may have some pricing margins to play with. But Microsoft's biggest problem is perception. A lot of people simply don't like the company, and it won't be successful forever unless it learns to deal with its customers. Can Microsoft be a technical leader and be vendor-friendly as well? Let me know in the talkback below.

To: johnd who wrote (25946)	7/13/1999 2:37:00 PM
From: Alan Buckley	Respond to of 74651

An excerpt from the link you posted below. Some have suggested the DOJ should try to force MSFT to "open source" Windows and throw it into this same morass. The effect would be to remove the choice of accountability and control from the marketplace, hardly a benefit to consumers. This is so misguided as to be almost unbelievable. --- "I couldn't even conceive of going to my vice president and advocating Netscape's browser now because of the confusion in the product development," said Barry Starrfield, webmaster at Martin Marietta Materials Inc. in Raleigh, N.C. Martin Marietta switched to Internet Explorer about seven months ago. "Frankly, I don't know if they're going to be able to deliver a stable browser in any reasonable period of time." Starrfield said. The North Carolina company isn't alone. A browser study in May by Zona Research Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., showed that 62% of 209 information technology professionals surveyed whose companies have corporate browser standards chose Internet Explorer. A key motivating factor is the desire for a uniform Microsoft desktop, observers said.