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

To: Thunder who wrote (50203)	9/28/2000 1:57:01 PM
From: Dave	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

I agree. MSFT's price action has been conspicuously range-bound. I have to think that this has been artificial. There's just too much activity in the stock, and too much volatile news, for this kind of passive action to occur naturally. There must be powerful, balanced market forces at work. My guess (based on no evidence so you may have a different take on this) is that these balanced forces are (1) MSFT buying back shares, and (2) mutual funds dumping shares.

To: Thunder who wrote (50203)	9/28/2000 2:14:20 PM
From: Thunder	Respond to of 74651

Here is an interesting article, for those who may have not read it: Microsoft's Split Personality By Rob Landley (TMF Oak) September 28, 2000 fool.com

To: Thunder who wrote (50203)	9/28/2000 3:22:56 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

re: big money isn't patient. Well, that's true. I've gotten rich, by buying stocks when the outlook for the next 6-12 months is horrible, and the longer-term outlook is excellent. Hopefully, my MSFT purchase last May fits that description. I don't mind waiting. I expect to. But I will consider my purchase a failure if I got in way too early, and way too high. Today's bounce, considering the Nas is up 100 points, is pitiful. It indicates that, when the Nas has a 100-point down day, MSFT is going to plunge. I've got a drunk monkey in the dark, throwing darts at a dartboard, and he makes my short-term market predictions for me. I've found this method works as well as any other. I think the Court's decision to not decide (into the indefinite far future), should have decreased uncertainty. It means that MSFT can do whatever they want, with a free hand. It means they can consolidate their browser dominance, and continue their other web ventures. So, my guess is that the stock's decline from 80 back to 60, indicates the market is worried about Microsoft's business, not the courts. If there is an Intel-type warning coming up, we should expect a further 20% haircut (60 to 48, ugh!)This is just a guess. Or maybe this is just random motion within a 60-80 trading range, signifying nothing. Since I am uncertain, I will probably just sit on my hands. And watch carefully.

To: Thunder who wrote (50203)	9/28/2000 5:35:22 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Is this guy an egomaniac or what? How pathetic. Sun selling CEO-autographed servers on eBay By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com September 28, 2000, 1:50 p.m. PT Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy share more than just a loathing for Microsoft. Following in Ellison's footsteps, McNealy autographed five of his company's new Sun Blade workstations and put them up for auction on eBay yesterday. Ellison pulled a similar publicity stunt in July when Oracle spinoff New Internet Computer Co. auctioned 10 Internet appliances with Ellison-signed authentication certificates on Amazon. Although there still are eight days to go before the Sun Blade auction closes, Ellison's signature already appears to have been more of a pull to potential buyers. New Internet Computers were bid up as high as $550, more than twice the regular $199 price tag. But with the Sun Blades' bids up to $7,300 as of midday today, the McNealy name hasn't been enough to carry the models up to even the $10,000 price Sun expects to sell them for through normal channels. McNealy's John Hancock left one bidder, Donald Goodwin, unmoved. "I could care less if Mr. McNealy signs them or not. It's a neat marketing tool, but I doubt it will add value to the system later on," he said in an email today. "The reason I am bidding is that the price is actually pretty reasonable for the level of performance these boxes should provide." A $7,000 price tag is a good deal, especially with a 21-inch monitor, but Goodwin said he expects the bidding to head north of his budget. The Sun Blade 1000 is the first Sun workstation to use the new UltraSparc III chip that Sun unveiled yesterday. Workstations are used by people with computation-demanding tasks such as creating animated movies, designing microprocessors or simulating car crashes. The Sun Blades themselves are an improvement to Sun's workstation line. The new machines are second only in performance to Compaq Computer Alpha workstations in number-crunching power, D.H. Brown Associates analyst Sarang Ghatpande said. However, Sun's graphics performance is another story, a problem that has hindered Sun's entry into many segments of the workstation market. "They definitely need to work on the graphics," Ghatpande said. "They're outdated compared to the rest of the competition." Sun's top-end Expert3D card uses the same graphics chip technology as 3Dlabs' Wildcat Intense3D graphics card built for Windows computers, but the "driver" software used to control the cards hasn't been tuned as well, Ghatpande said. "They took a Windows card and tweaked it around for Solaris," he said. "The raw performance is good, but the application performance is not that high." It's too soon to tell whether upcoming graphics systems based on Sun's MAJC chip will work well, he added. Unix workstations are generally more powerful than their Windows-Intel brethren, but the lower cost of the Intel machines is changing the market. The arrival of Intel's delayed 64-bit Itanium chip, which features much better calculating abilities than current chips, is expected to further boost Intel models. Sun has been selling workstations, servers, storage systems and other products at auction sites eBay, TekSell and Mercata for months in an attempt to win new customers. The company also has expanded the program to let other companies that sell Sun hardware buy their goods from auction instead of just from Sun. In the Intel workstation realm, SGI today released its new Zx10 workstation, the latest model resulting from SGI's takeover of the Intergraph line. The Zx10 with a 933-MHz Pentium III has a bare-bones starting price of $5,135.