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

To: Frank Ellis Morris who wrote (35187)	12/7/1999 4:28:00 PM
From: craig crawford	Respond to of 74651

There is a simple solution to all this. Shareholders don't care about the lawsuits, only the stock price. Shareholders will stick with MSFT as long as they are rewarded with price appreciation. If this stock appears that it's going to sit in a range for another 8 months people will grow frustrated and will jump ship. All these bozos have to do is trot the CFO out and talk about how good Q4 numbers are going to be. Where are you Microsoft? Where is the positive pre-announcement we have all been waiting for???? You do it all the time, right now it is needed badly! After all, you did use the word "awesome" last Q didn't you? You weren't lying to us were you? If things really are "awesome" then you shouldnt have any problem coming out and saying that you plan on exceeding Q4 expectations by 4 or 5 cents. All you have to do is get your stock to break above 100 and it will resume it's climb, and your shareholders will be content to stick with you through these harrowing times. So hurry up about it, I'm tired of waiting for the close above 97-98 and I'm going to jump ship like everyone else! P.S. Where the f--ck are the analysts???? Haven't heard a positive call on Microsoft in a long time.

To: Frank Ellis Morris who wrote (35187)	12/7/1999 4:28:00 PM
From: Brian Malloy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

It is still early. I think a small position can still be taken in RHAT then add on any weakness.

To: Frank Ellis Morris who wrote (35187)	12/7/1999 7:45:00 PM
From: Valley Girl	Respond to of 74651

Interesting theory, but then look at the astonishing rise in the other blue-chip techs since the Judge's pronouncement, e.g. CSCO, SUNW, etc. Isn't it more likely money exiting a stock like MSFT (or formerly earmarked for entry) would shift to those and not to RHAT? RHAT has a good product and a terrific CEO, but as for buying the stock, one word: earnings? If you're buying the stock just "because it's going up", then you're a momentum investor, relying on a bigger fool to eventually appear and pay more for it than you did. Mind you, it could work for years, as it seems to be in many internet stocks I could name. If that's your course Brian's strategy seems as good a way as any to play it. If you're buying because you think it's got a big earnings upside long-term, then where's it going to come from? Not retail sales, since as others have pointed out the Gnome UI isn't ready for prime time. Boxmakers? But since RHAT's big value-add is the bundling and install, not the OS itself, where does that leave them? Boxmakers can do that themselves and then use disk-cloning facilities to stamp out the pre-configured boxes. Support contracts with companies intent on running businesses on Intel hardware? Plausible. Add-on software components, like the useless stuff they package into the more expensive retail bundles? Maybe, but freeware versions of same may appear to hoist them by their own petard. P.S. if anyone reading this is at all interested in investing in RHAT but hasn't looked at the product, I'd encourage you to do so as part of your due diligence. I have and I can categorically refute several of the statements quoted earlier regarding it. Re. the price being $130, here in the bay area you can pick up RH 6.1 standard edition for $30 at Fry's. More costly versions are sold, too, but they don't contain anything essential. And yes you can get it from other sources at near-cost, for example my hacker friends inform me that www.cheapbytes.com will sell you the exact same RHAT disks for just $2 (plus $8 shipping!). I bought mine retail because it was quicker and because I prefer to have my dollars go to support a store I shop at and the company that makes the product. The poster was right about the extreme pain of attempting to download and set up a Linux system from piece-parts, but then that's the whole point. RHAT's value proposition is that their install is quick and simple (though not flawless in my case - for example I did everything short of sacrificing a goat to convince DiskDruid my drive was 36 gig, but in the end I had to partition it under W2K and rerun the install). The installation really is between 300-400 meg depending on what options you choose, not 1 gig as quoted. To reach 1 gig you'd have to install the source code, kindly provided but not normally installed by most users except in snippets as needed. Besides, who cares, disk space is cheap! As for the running system, it's true that Gnome won't look like a good replacement for Windows to most consumers, but it's pretty good as far as Unix GUIs go, and anyway I don't think consumers are the real targets here. As a workstation/server OS, it comes with a great number of applications and utilities, including (ironically) a web browser (and it's doubly-ironic because it's Navigator 4.6; no OS vendor in their right minds would think of shipping a GUI without a pre-installed browser these days, are you paying attention Mr. Jackson?). The biggest downer, and a good reason to stick with NT, is that there just aren't any of the apps one needs available. RH 6.1 comes bundled with Star Office, but it just plain doesn't work, at least not on my system (symptom: after the install, you run "soffice", it thinks for a while, then exits with no error message).