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Technology Stocks : MicroStrategy Inc. (MSTR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sadsack who wrote (317)	10/4/1999 12:05:00 PM
From: treetopflier	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 717

Why a consulting company? Let's take an example. Saylor claims his software can ferret out 20 fraudulent transactions from a billion. How does it do that? Does he have a fraud detection engine that you set a few parameters and it turns on bells and whistles when one of these transactions occurs. Of course not. His products are 'works in process' that take MANY more times the hours to customize than what he derives in license revenue. Much of the consulting is NOT performed by his company or the licensing revenue would be a lower percentage. He has partnered with companies like Anderson who have long established track records of extracting HUGE $$$ from large companies while trying to customize/install partially viable products like MSTRs that don't scale up in production and don't have the functionality that they claim to have. In the early/mid 90's Dayton Hudson attempted to use these products to provide access to VERY large data sources for all of their merchants (buyers). Give 'em a call and ask how it is going. Best Buy is attempting to do it right now. Check out how their stock price behaved when analysts got wind that all these projects are late. Why are they late? Because they don't perform as advertised and the vendors/consultants stand around pointing fingers at each other as to why it doesn't work, but they ignore the fundamental difficulties in performing nearly adhoc queries against very large datasets. Must be a partitioning problem... No, must be the shitty SQL that the MSTR query engine is submitting... No must be the database design.... No must be the Telecast parameters for handling datasets returned by the database to the client are set wrong... No must be the middleware... No the network packet size must be TOO large... Been there. Saylor has NO magic to deal with this underlying problem. His software can NOT go into the data. His software DOES NOT tightly integrate with the database engine, nor can it scale like the database engine does on the back side. He does have REALLY COOL slides and a spiffy web site tho. And a nice reference list, most of whom are not in production. ttf