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

To: Stormweaver who wrote (35024)	12/2/1999 12:11:00 PM
From: Valley Girl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

James: Very interesting. I agree with the price/performance equations working for Intel, but question is does platform cost matter? It's beyond my direct experience so I'm guessing here, but if you're a big web site, seems to me the most costly thing you'd face is an outage of the customer-facing part of your site, which can cost millions and damage your reputation severely. What's number two? Another guess is it's hiring, training, and retaining staff to run the site. Re. the outage, I agree that having more boxes makes you more resistant to trouble, but beyond a certain size you'll have enough even of the big boxes to where it doesn't matter. Really big sites like AMZN have 60+ big machines already just on the customer-facing side. On the people side, it would seem you'd need less people to keep 100 largish boxes running than racks of 1000 smaller boxes, no? BTW I agree completely re. Java, it would be a huge mistake of MSFT to drop out of the race here, especially since they're winning it with IE5's JVM implementation, the best on the block for Java 1.1. Mr. Gates, recant your heresy!