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

To: rudedog who wrote (47327)	6/28/2000 3:15:00 PM
From: abbigail	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Dear rudedog: You are correct. The economics will eventually win over the most dogmatic devotees of the central, controlled models. Something I clipped and saved from the WSJ, 1/23/97: " MSH Entertainment Corp, a tiny San Francisco animation firm, recently replaced its pricey Silicon Graphics machines with Wintel machines to create an animated children's TV series. Says Christopher Haigh, creative director at MSH: THE PC IS THE COCKROACH OF THE COMPUTING WORLD. WHEN ALL THE OTHER BIG COMPUTERS ARE GONE, IT'S GOING TO RULE THE EARTH abbigail <:]

To: rudedog who wrote (47327)	6/28/2000 8:53:00 PM
From: ProDeath	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

My positions have not one thing to do with Sun vs. Microsoft, and I have stated previously, I find the whole "vs. Sun" discussion to be a CJ. That said, it's touching that Microsoft products have finally unseated Sybase in this small but flashy niche. An effort that began after the 1994 divorce between MS and Sybase has born fruit just in time to be largely irrelevant. Back in the day, I recall marveling at the level of compensation of Sybase reps and their propensity to avoid hard database questions, instead reminding us just what a Wall street darling they were. We found Sybase had its limits, and Squeaky Server inherited most of them, bastard stepchild of Sybase that it is. One limitation that Sybase did not have back then was support; on the server side it was excellent. I believe a large part of the decline of Sybase can be laid at the door of the crew of smarmy fast-buck artists that came over from Powersoft who saw little value in a database engine, a situation exploited by more than one competitor ;-). Given this, Squeaky Server is the commercial alternative that requires the least amount of code conversion, it's the easy way out of Sybase. What you describe is all about bare adequacy for largely OLTP applications; this is duckville, the easy greasy teenage stuff than any vendor's product can do. For the harder stuff, like warehousing and decision support, alternatives like Oracle or DB2 make Sybase or SS look weak at best. Please don't tell me about the TeraServer thing, that's as bogus a demonstration as any I've ever seen, and has nothing to do with large databases in most applications. As database platforms go, Sun is definitely not my first choice, I've had much better results with HP for this purpose. The place I see Sun shining (sorry) in right now is on the front end of large-scale high-availability e-commerce solutions. In my recent experience, Sun on the front end and HP on the back is the right stuff. Of course, one of the principle advantages of Unix is that you can get it on just about any hardware you can name. I find the decision by MS to restrict NT/2000 to Intel-based hardware very limiting in the long view.