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

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (34998)	12/1/1999 7:05:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 74651

Charles, Re: "Why do you think RISC drivers are harder to develop than Wintel?" Even if they aren't harder, there is an immense force behind the development of drivers for anything Wintel. It's amazing that Apple is doing well when the first 90 something percent of priority for anything common to Wintel and Apple goes to Wintel. Ever have to support an OS/2 platform, or something like that? Tony

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (34998)	12/1/1999 7:12:00 PM
From: Alan Buckley	Respond to of 74651

[Why would you need to dual boot Windows98? Isn't NT sufficient?] For most purposes it is sufficient, but there are still things that work better on Windows98. Games and legacy apps come to mind. I wouldn't buy RISC for a home workstation or other un-dedicated purpose, for example. Also, there are support advantages to having all-Intel (or all-anything else) machines in an office environment. [Why do you think RISC drivers are harder to develop than Wintel?] It's specifically the debugging that's harder. RISC compilers are constantly stashing to the numerous registers and overwriting same. It can be extremely complicated to locate a function argument or local variable a couple levels up the call stack. Also, the smaller instruction set simply gives fewer "at a glance" clues about what the code is doing. In my experience, it's more an issue in drivers than user-mode apps. Debug one Alpha driver and you'll understand why the first question developers ask when an Alpha bug is reported is "does it repro on Intel?" [What does portability matter if you're never going to exercise it?] They did exercise it and it lit a fire under Intel to take a serious look at the advantages RISC was offering and respond pronto. Plus, the option to exercise it again in the future is now a task of known difficulty rather than a theoretical. This is good. Finally, if MSFT had not developed a RISC NT there would have been truckloads of FUD from SUNW on how RISC was inherently better. (I don't mean this as a slam on SUNW. They're a good company with good products, but obviously it's in their interest to denigrate NT, right or wrong.)