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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: willkm3 who wrote (33010)	10/14/2000 5:38:29 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Hey, gang. I'm back from Disneyworld. I leave and you guys let our boats get blasted and haven't solved the Mid-East Crisis yet. Then you go and sell your stock, putting me firmly back in the middle class. So much for the Magic Kingdom! By the way, if you haven't tried Disney's MGM theme park high on an overdose of Robitussin DM, I highly recommend it. The rides are great, but the tourists are are really a trip. It's 100 acres of toone-town! Now, about GM's remarks as sent my willkm3: We may have a category problem creeping into our discussion of Net Appliances, EMC, and Veritas. The issue is not hardware versus software. All systems these days get the bulk of their value-add from software. The issue is software linked to proprietary hardware versus cross-platform software that is hardware independent. (I do wish that GM would learn how to say and spell "Network Appliance". Or is there a company called "Net Appliances". He isn't scoring any credibility points with me on this discussion, but I like his books, so I'll give him a Mulligan this time. Boy, do we have a category problem with NTAP! NTAP's software is NOT dependent on "proprietary" hardware. All of the hardware in an NTAP filer (or NetCache appliance) is off-the-shelf stuff. But...NTAP will not sell its filer software without the box that it runs on. Nor will NTAP support a filer that has third party devices installed by the customer. The reason(s) for this are many: 1) NTAP's system reliability goals are very high. Almost all system interruptions are hardware-related. NTAP, therefore, insists that all hardware on a filer is NTAP-certified, burned-in, and supported. 2) Part of NTAP's system reliability mechanisms include same-day shipping of replacement components when a failure occurs. Thus the parts must be under NTAP warranty, thus NTAP must provide the original component. 3) NTAP wants the hardware and service margins, too. (One exception to the above is the NetCache software, which is sold for customer installation on UNIX or NT platforms.) NetApp could, someday, chose to sell its ONTAP OS and other software options for customer install on customer-provided hardware. That is not likely to happen. NetApp could also modify its policies such that the customer could provide their own disk drives. That is not likely to happen, either, simply because their are some very significant differences in the firmware provided by disk drive manufacturers, even for the same drive model. NTAP certifies drives right down to the firmware level. On the positive side, the fact that NTAP is reselling, pre-assembled and tested hardware components means that NTAP is striving to provide the most reliable systems possible, but at a low price. It also means that as hardware innovations occur, NTAP can very easily implement those innovations without having to re-design proprietary hardware components. In some cases, it is simply a matter of certifying the new hardware, measuring the value of these innovations, and including them in the NTAP product. I hope that made some sense. It probably did not. I am not fully recovered from the "AeroSmith Rock and Roller Coaster" ride yet. (highly recommended)