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

To: alydar who wrote (51818)	10/20/2000 11:46:10 AM
From: sandeep	Respond to of 74651

Bob, the idea behind .Net is the freedom to have decentralized systems which talk to each other using the same language. So, one person's ancient system can talk to other's modern system. Also, all the information is connected and kept synchronized and consistent. While this concept may not be new, someone needs to push VERY HARD for standards in all fields. Microsoft thinks it can do that. Everything else such as how you get your software, whether you have a thin client or not are not material issues. Everything else has a place in the right circumstances.

To: alydar who wrote (51818)	10/20/2000 11:53:06 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 74651

Bob - you really need to dig into this to understand the issues. I had already come to the conclusion that the growing trend toward centralization on the web was going to blow up long before MSFT came out with .NET. The backend will require bigger and bigger servers, the databases to maintain context, authentication and serve up content will also need to be bigger, and it already is almost at the breaking point in some cases, with the industry in its infancy. The current flavor of Hotmail, MSN, and so on are not significantly different than AOL but they are also not examples of a .NET architecture. I see that as a reflection of the heritage of the early development of the net - everyone went at it in the same way. You will not see any concrete examples of systems built on .NET architectures for a while, and we have yet to see how well they will be executed, but the other path (just scale up what we have now) is almost a sure non-starter. Look at the kind of thing Akamai is doing to get a feel for the benefits of moving provisioning of information closer to the edge - and I don't think Akamai is more than a concept piece at the moment, interesting as it is. ASPs just move the problems of centralized provisioning from a local LAN to the web - not a long term winner in my view, and the tepid acceptance of the model bears out my fears. I think the ASP model as currently conceived will be a footnote in the history of the net. When I went to the Forum2000 launch of .NET I was looking hard to see the "old" MSFT wolf in sheep's clothing. Instead what I saw was a well thought out description of the same problems I had been seeing in my own work, with some very interesting solutions proposed which had no fundamental flaws. There needs to be a LOT of work - in standards, in changes to the various business models in the industry today, and in raw product development - to make it happen. I think this initiative also works against the "MSFT DNA" - the culture that developed in MSFT over the last 10 to 15 years. But top management seems to have both a unified vision and the will to go after the prize.