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

To: Stormweaver who wrote (28218)	8/16/1999 11:36:00 AM
From: ToySoldier	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

James, Too bad I disagree with you. I never did say that Novell is pinning its future on NT NDS sales. It has simply covered the NT treat bases. NetWare 5 sales are currently far better than even Novell's initial internal predictions (prior to the NetWare 5 release). MSFT is NOVL's best friend right now by its tripping and fumbling and several year delay of NT5 and the infant 1st version Active Directory. In fact, NOVL Marketing is chomping at the bit and hoping that MSFT finally puts Active Directory out on the market - WHY? - because MSFT actually have to start marketing the benefits of a Directory Service (something they have obviously been very quiet about until they have a product on the market themselves). This MSFT marketing of Directory Services will boost the overall demand for A directory service (not only MSFT's directory service). Secondly, and more importantly, NOVL will be able to perform DIRECT product comparisons of their mature NDS vs MSFT infant Active Directory. MSFT will not be able to hide behind Vaporware against NOVL's actual operating product. One of NOVL's "Eric Schmidt" strategies is that we will be the company that makes MSFT technology work better! With that being said, many of NOVL's products are designed to integrate with MSFT's OS and other products. This is a great strategy in that not only do they have superior products for those customers that use NetWare, NDS, and other NOVL technologies, but NOVL is also able to leverage/leech off any success that MSFT has on its side. MSFT can't even shake NOVL off since by doing so MSFT would damage their own product. In other words, MSFT's previous "make proprietary and then win the US-vs-THEM war" strategy will not work anymore. MSFT's win is now NOVL's win as well. MSFT's loss is NOVL's win. What a concept! More and more Corporate IT shops canmot wait for the persistent "next year" fulfillment of MSFT's vision. MSFT has proven that they cannot deliver on the fluffy IT vision they have sold to corporate IT shops over the past several years. IT shops have objectives to meet and I think a lot of corporate IT customers are starting to feel that they wre bamboozled by MSFT marketing into a vision that clearly MSFT cannot ever deliver! So James, I will dispute your prediction and say that you will not see a lot of migration of NetWare servers to NT2000 - specially early in the year. What IT shop would be stupid enough to migrate a mature an smoothly running OS to an OS that is only months, weeks, or possibly only days old (since NT5 Windows2000 or whatever MSFT is calling it now still has not been released)? Please tell me? I would really like to know what company is truly that stupid. In fact, even if Windows2000 were even mature, with the Y2K issue, no serious IT shop has plans on the books to migrate anything in Q1/00. Most have reserved that time for Post-Y2K survival assessment (i.e. how did we survive through the big date change and what fixes do we have to make that we didnt find prior to the date). But James, that was a nice "off the cuff" prediction on your part. Initially it sounded great and likely got the MSFT cheerleading crowd on this board feeling good about themselves and shy MSFT product called Windows2000. BUT - I would like to hear your reasoning behind why you think early 2000 will be a great time for the industry to abandon Novell servers and move to a brand new Windows 2000. Put your CIO, IT Director, System Administrator hat on and tell me why they would make this decision. Thanks James! Toy