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To: Bob Kim who wrote (108249)	9/11/2000 10:55:48 AM
From: Eric Wells	Respond to of 164684

Do you know the people at CrossGain? No, I do not know them personally. Tod Nielsen was head of the Access group during a good part of the time when I was at Microsoft. He was considered a sort of "evangelist" for the Access product - very high profile. As far as his being a "technical visionary", I don't have any knowledge or data with which to comment. Adam Bosworth and Rod Chavez were also both at Microsoft at the same time as I, but I know nothing about them. There's little information about the company on their web site - so it's difficult to tell what exactly they are going to do. But it appears that they are building software development tools based on XML - whether these are stand alone tools (such as Visual Basic) or ASP hosted tools is unknown. The positive about the company is that they seem to have a lot of high profile people and firms backing them (Barksdale, Bill Gurley - Benchmark Capital). The three negatives (and it's difficult to say how significant these negative points are without knowing more about the company) are: 1. I'm leery of companies that base business models on programming technologies - in this case XML. It's hard to say if they are really positioning themselves as an "XML company". Several years ago, when Java was first starting to get popular, you saw many companies that were basing their competitive advantage on "Java" - yet, you see very little of that today with Java. It's just a programming language. And what's really important is the product, and not necessarily the language. How many companies do you see touting "we base are competitive advantage on C++"? 2. Competing in the developer tools market is very difficult for small firms. There's not a significant amount of money to be made in developer tools - for example, the amount of money that Microsoft makes selling Visual Basic is much much less than what Microsoft makes selling Office or Windows. 3. CrossGain may potentially be competing against Microsoft - this is not always a wise thing to do (although some firms have been successful at it). Microsoft, being a big proponent of XML, is most likely going to come out with it's own suite of XML development tools (if they have not already done so - I'm a bit behind on the XML development tool front). However, the executive staff's close association with Microsoft could signal that they are going to be collaborating with Microsoft. That's about all I can offer on CrossGain. Thanks for forwarding the article - I had not heard of the company before today. -Eric