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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: almaxel who wrote (32990)	6/22/2000 2:04:00 PM
From: almaxel	Respond to of 64865

To: almaxel who wrote (32990)	6/22/2000 11:30:00 PM
From: almaxel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

MS biggest vaporware announcement ever!!: By Charles Cooper, ZDNet News June 22, 2000 4:25 PM PT REDMOND, Wash. -- Bill Gates sauntered onto the stage here on Thursday and proceeded to give one of his best demos in recent memory. With Joel Klein and the trustbusters shoved -- at least temporarily -- into the background, Microsoft's chief technology officer was back in his element, sketching out a new vision for personal computing. Lots of new buzzwords, lots of thought- provoking new approaches -- this was exciting stuff that held the audience rapt throughout a 79-minute presentation. Only one problem: This also turned out to one of Microsoft's biggest vaporware announcements ever. And that's too bad: The panoply of products and services that Microsoft has put together under the catch-all term .Net (pronounced "dot net") advance the industry's thinking about ways to incorporate natural user interfaces and smart clients and services. The company's done a nice job of eliminating the artificial and kludgy barriers that separate the Web, messages and productivity applications. It also provided a refreshed, XML-centric architecture that takes account of the shift in the computer industry in the past few years. Bid goodbye to Information at Your Fingertips, hello, Microsoft Everywhere. Gates -- and later in the day, his lieutenants -- talked up a future where all kinds of personal information would be safely stored and retrieved from "out on the cloud," from businesses that were running all kinds of sophisticated Web-based services. This isn't a revolutionary theme; IBM Corp.'s Lou Gerstner put forward something very similar a few years ago. Of course, the big difference is that if Microsoft indeed succeeds in turning .Net into a reality, Windows and the attendant MS application programs will receive a recharged lease on life. That would be good news for Redmond, which wants to make sure it retains the role of first among equals in the emerging era of Internet appliances and media convergence. No overnight success But it's going to take at least another two years before the whole shebang is ready for prime time, a not-so-small point that Gates rushed through at the tail end of his demonstration. When it comes to computing and the Internet, the world can change in two years, a truism about technology that Microsoft knows only too well. In fact, it may take longer than that. I cornered Chief Operating Officer Bob Herbold, who said it will likely take as long as five years for the world to resemble the whiz-bang video Microsoft put together playing up how the benefits of .Net would extend to small businesses and beyond. Herbold's point was that this was a strategy day and that the first pieces were already available. To be sure, Microsoft is fairly good at doing the vision thing, a handy talent if the company's going to convince the rest of the industry to march to its tune. But this is also a race against time. Microsoft already faces keen competition from a resurgent America Online, which is taking tangible steps to make its software platform a de facto interface for Internet devices. George Jetson videos may be cute. But in the end, they rate as little more than holding actions. Ralf