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

To: JC Jaros who wrote (47225)	6/24/2000 12:26:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

JC, >You've been saying that for a very long time now. If 'benchmarks' and 'expensive' meant all that you infer, you'd really be onto something. Are you saying benchmarks are meaningless, or otherwise garbage? I doubt you are, but, anyway, benchmarks have been an important measure of relative system performance for decades. The bigger computer companies have benchmark centers, which they invite prospective customers to come into and witness benchmark runs on the computer company's new equipment, or run their own software, for which the customer will have numbers for already installed systems. What the customer sees in terms of benchmark performance is a huge factor, with regard to whether he buys or not. People predicted the demise of the mainframe as far back as the early 80s. IBM and others using it as a cash cow pooh-poohed that for years. They were too reliable, had no peer as a powerful single image, massive I/O, throughput, hundreds of billions of $ in legacy SW already installed...It finally happened in the early 90s. They're not dead, but not growing at all either. Might as well be dead, though, as a stock driver. Reason for this history is that the predictions of a Sun demise sound remarkably similar to me. Just takes time. Oh, mainframes got eaten up from below by cheaper, simpler, more open - systems with far better price/performance (benchmarks!). Sound familiar? One other factor about MFs was that, after a while, you just couldn't find new hires that knew, or wanted to learn MVS, VM, CICS, JES2 and all that other mainframe proprietary jazz. I wonder how many young people want to specialize in Solaris today, vs. W2K, or more standard Unix, or Linux? Tony