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

To: Stormweaver who wrote (34999)	12/1/1999 8:18:00 PM
From: PMS Witch	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

...will people upgrade their win95/98/NT boxes to 2000... I only see two reasons to upgrade: W2000 has some 'gotta have' features; Win98 has some 'gotta get away from' flaws. I'm sure everyone has a 'wish list' for their OS. How well Microsoft gauges the public's appetites will determine the upgrade penetration. However, let's not forget that new PCs need OSs too, and that few people buy today's hardware with yesterday's software if given a choice. I'm probably in a minority here, but I'd rather see Windows trying to accomplish less but execute more reliably. The thrill of a new feature wears off very quickly when work stops because of yet another malfunction. I hope W2000 proves to be a stable OS. I'd rather wait a while longer and load a debugged product. In the long run, the repeated promise of reliability must be delivered or credibility is sacrificed. However, I'm aware that Microsoft gets the blame when things go wrong, their fault or not. Today's PC is much more complex than just a few years ago. Not all drivers are from Microsoft. Microsoft didn't write my BIOS. Each vendor adds their stuff to the pot too and not all developers follow guidelines. Cheers, PW

To: Stormweaver who wrote (34999)	12/1/1999 9:44:00 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

Re: OS Wars Actually, the biggest threat to SUNW is neither MSFT nor INTC. It's EMC. The reason is simple: It's the data. The bandwidth explosion that is the driving force behind the growth in the internet is simultaneously fueling an equally furious explosion in data. Forrester estimates that by 2003 75% of all IT hardware spending will be on storage. Demand for processing power is growing at a snail's pace compared to demand for storage and the result is that the vast bulk of IT hardware revenue and profits over the next five years will come from this sector. This explains why the traditional box makers (SUNW, CPQ, DELL, IBM, HWP) are all scrambling to shore up their data storage offerings. Traditionally, the processor was the center of the IT universe and storage was literally a "peripheral". Over the next several years that arrangement will be reversed as the rise of Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) becomes the center of the enterprise and processors are pushed to the periphery. The information needs of the 21st century enterprise will consist of a logically centralized but physically distributed multi-petabyte SAN to which processing clusters compete for attachment rights. What does this mean for MSFT and INTC? Good news, actually. SANs are essentially dedicated-purpose storage servers. As data moves to the center of the enterprise, this will accelerate the commoditization of processing at the enterprise level the same way that computing on the desktop has been commoditized by the PC. This means that Wintel processing clusters, as the price/performance leaders, can expect a dominant market share in the attachment server space. Moreover, there is Wintel opportunity in the SAN space itself. EMC is standardizing on INTC processors within the SAN and my guess is there is an opportunity for embedded NT in this space as well.