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Technology Stocks : RealNetworks (NASDAQ:RNWK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pruguy who wrote (3886)	7/16/1999 1:26:00 AM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5843

Hello Pruguy, > Appreciatte you stopping by today for several visits....Maybe > things are going so smoothly now at Novell, you can kick your feet > up for a few hours: ;-) Not quite, but I'm trying to focus on some analysis again for a while ... more reading and more writing ... > that means that real has increased their presence by a greater > amount in order to be flat in market share....no one is gaining at > this point which I think says a great deal. I agree ... and I hope that they keep pushing forward. I guess that I'm just trying to evaluate very conservatively what the competition is up to. Not too long ago Netscape was the dominant browser ahead of everyone ... but now the market has shifted. They are not out, but they now have competition. I think that in all markets, especially high-tech, there can be very fast changes. I'm still holding, and I see the company continuing to do well ... Scott>> Microsoft was trying to reduce the number of players on your Scott>> hard disk ... by eliminating the need for the RealPlayer! Pruguy> Can you explain this? I am not following this reasoning. Microsoft is very good at playing a game that I'll call "abstraction". It is a very good business practice, and a very effective way to keep and gain control of computer software and systems. What Microsoft does is they build layers of software or applications which cover their own technologies and the technologies of others. For example, the have a word processor called Word, and they quickly realized that it needed to read and write their proprietary formats of documents along with the competitors formats. Now a customer would look at the Microsoft product and realize that if they upgraded to Microsoft Word, it would still read all of the "content" or documents that had been created with other applications. And it provided other new and enhanced features. Likewise they do this with their APIs for developers. When programming on Windows to write an E-Mail application you use the MAPI interfaces. Microsoft created MAPI as a interface which provided a layer over all mail interfaces, from all vendors, on Windows. And they got developers to write to it. And they provided MAPI features throughout Windows. So everyone wrote to these APIs. But what that does is "abstract" the functionality from the vendor of the e-mail system so that it is easier to upgrade or migrate to a Microsoft mail system. The is what they are trying to do in the directory area right now ... they have created ADSI which is a layer over a wide range of directory services. With these developments they basically approach the customer with the question "Which would you rather develop to? One vendors mail system, or our APIs and get all mail systems?" The answer becomes easy ... develop to Microsoft APIs. So with the integration of Real into the Microsoft Media Player Microsoft is able to ask "Do you only want Real support, or do you want the best of both worlds and use our player and get Real support plus our rich set of Microsoft services?" This becomes a very attractive proposal ... one instead of two! And this then becomes the fall of a company to plumbing ... which I believe is a dangerous place to be. I think it's important to stay extremely visible to the end-user ... it's about brand and brand-recognition ... ;-) > Thanks and hope we see more of you. Thanks ... I enjoy the discussions. Again ... I'm long Real ... I have stuck it out and been holding since my original purchase. And I intend to hold longer ... Real has done a fantastic job so far! Scott C. Lemon