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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (44598)	5/9/2000 8:45:00 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

thanks for the thoughtful post: You're making me paranoid, talking about how insecure info like my brokerage password is. The thing is, a Nokia cellphone is not the answer to that problem. If I already know what stock I want, at what price, then I can place the trade using a phone. But that is only the end of the process. Before I place the order, I need to review the stock chart, read many analyst reports about the industry and company (available at my broker's web sites), review the company balance sheet and latest earnings reports, review recent business news, etc. Can a phone, or any thin client, let me do that? I need a PC. Maybe, with voice recognition software a lot better than anything available today, I could get by without a keyboard. But the monitor is necessary. And every time I upgrade, I get a bigger monitor. If I replace the guts of my PC with a thin client attached to a big monitor, then I'd need a fiber optic cable running right into the back end of the thin client, or it will be noticably slower. I've got a cable modem now, and data comes out of it slower than from my hard drive. In the last year, my cable modem service has been down 3 times. My hard drive has never been down. Putting in a bigger hard drive will be a lot cheaper than bringing a fiber optic cable to my home. Thin clients will only work when the entire communications infrastructure is 2 or 3 orders of magnitude faster/bigger. And a lot more reliable. That will happen, but not in the next 5 years, which is about as far into the future as there is any point in looking. Thin clients are sort of like fuel cells and electric cars. Nice concept, never quite ready for mass production.