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

To: Michael Do who wrote (58385)	5/24/2001 10:21:54 AM
From: t2	Respond to of 74651

The analogy of Nokia to Microsoft is interesting. For now, Nokia is probably more like Intel; like the extra one pays to get "intel inside". People are more willing to pay for Nokia. Nokia's dominance in the wireless market is what makes it now easier for Microsoft to move into that area, IMHO. I like both MSFT and Nokia stock...however, Nokia's position is a lot less secure.

To: Michael Do who wrote (58385)	5/24/2001 11:52:12 AM
From: dybdahl	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

First of all, I believe that Nokia will not be so dominant on handsets in the future. The german market just had a consumer test that made Motorola and Ericsson look much better than Nokia, and in the long run, it's limited how much difference there can be between Nokia and competitors on handsets. The big difference between Microsoft and Nokia is that nobody requires you to buy Nokia, unlike Microsoft. There are many public institutions and software vendors today, that require Windows as an operating system or MS Office as an office suite, if you want to use their software or communicate efficiently with them. The MSFT case was about the Win32 platform. If so much of the western world's economy is based on the Win32 platform, there should be a free market of Win32 platform OS variants, which was exactly the result of the DOJ case. As far as I know, there is not much economy based on any Nokia proprietary standard. In fact, Nokia is what it is today because of the NMT telephone system, the scandinavian, analog predecessor of GSM. The clever thing about NMT was, that all interfaces where standardized, so that all components in the infrastructure could be replaced with components from other vendors. Standardization was done independantly of vendors. Nokia and Ericsson were both small companies in the NMT zone, but quickly expanded internationally, and were some of the best prepared companies for GSM because they knew NMT so well. Nokia, Ericsson and other GSM phone manufacturers compete so much, that a month's delay in the R&D department for a product could make the difference between big earnings and no earnings for the product. Microsoft easily delays several months and still goes strong - they would never survive in the competitive environment that Nokia is placed in. Lars.