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

To: JC Jaros who wrote (44529)	5/8/2000 6:43:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

JC - the next major paradigm shift (I rate the rise of the internet as the last one) will be the shift away from OS and LAN centric architectures to a "meta-layer" which rides above the OS. This is not the cosmic "network is the computer" because it's not the network either. JDN and others have been enamored by the EMC pitch about storage being the core of the new paradigm - that's not it either. Compute resources, storage, application hosting capability, and local security policy will be superceded by services which assume that those components exist in a relatively agnostic and fungible way. The key drivers of this new paradigm will be management of routes, available bandwidth, content delivery in a more deterministic mode, intelligent migration of data and applications, enablement of devices whose user format is less specific than current html or even XML can support. I already see a shift to that model among the same kind of people who were hot on the potential of the internet in 1993. I think this shift is inevitable and already underway, and I believe that all of the major players - including MSFT and SUNW - recognize the shift and are jockeying for position. Big winners will be the people who can capture developer mindshare with a compelling and universal development environment for this new world. SUNW has some early traction with JAVA and related initiatives, but that is ante for the game, not the winning hand. Big losers will be those who try and exploit a "platform" architecture - I think EMC falls into that category, along with some others, and I think that's what some of the increasingly desperate rhetoric from EMC is designed to hide. As that new paradigm develops, the potential for disruptive activity rises right along with it. The infrastructure providers will need to develop a new way of thinking about their security models both to assure that market forces don't drive abuse of privacy and confidentiality, and also to keep e-commerce in its consumer flavor from degenerating into chaos. ISPs as we know them today will evolve - either towards an ASP model, or into an increasingly commoditized service business at the edge of the net. In either role, they are the logical place for some kinds of content management to avoid disruptive activity.