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Technology Stocks : Applix is back in action -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mark smith who wrote (1940)	11/17/1997 11:16:00 PM
From: Kashish King	Respond to of 3014

I like to use the analogy of a large chain of hotels... or may be just a large hotel... what the heck, any old hotel, which has a collection of Wintel boat anchors which it's considering upgrading to accomodate the latest in MS bloatware. Instead of boggling their minds with a bewildering array of new features, and slaying their machines with a new collection of newly-hatched bugs, why try some slim-ware on some just-do-it hardware? The reduction in total ownership costs -- or TOC if you prefer the TLA -- is as real as the new software products are effective. Business wants efficacy at reasonable cost. Business is results driven, as are users, and there's no way that Bill Gates can tell me with a straight fact that I could not acheive more in less time with better quality using rationally designed, smaller footprint, lower cost software. The problem is they have a decade of investment in this COM morass which any reasonable person could have told them was brain-dead from the start. They hide behind language independence which actually means VISUAL BASIC and not these newfangled OO sytems. Fortunately for consumers, there is a far better alternative to their procedural, late 70's approach to building software. Java is a threat to Microsoft's smart-appliance strategy, their internet strategy, their enterprise strategy, and so on. The benefits are so pronounced from both the user's and the developer's viewpoint that Microsoft is guaranteed to fail this time. There is no way Windows CE or Windows 98 are going to get a free pass, and I predict that Micrsoft will end up serving the Java community or stop growing.

To: mark smith who wrote (1940)	11/18/1997 1:53:00 AM
From: Kashish King	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3014

I signed up for the beta and will try out the demo as soon as I upgrade my browser -- I am doing what Microsoft knew I would do, namely, using whatever was there after booting. We have a small office at the beach with 5 employees and a single server; each of us has at least one computer and most of them are Frank Stein Systems, that is, we cobbled them together ourselves after several trips to Fry's Electronics; no two are alike. Now, if the Applix Java products run without a problem in our shop you get five gold stars. Hopefully when the NT slash Win95 product is released, APLX makes a big splash. The OLAP stuff is not something that interests me but there appears to be a lot of enterprise-wide symmetry with that, the help-desk, et cetera.

To: mark smith who wrote (1940)	11/22/1997 5:30:00 AM
From: Kashish King	Respond to of 3014

Mark, you guys should be almost giving away the office suite and changing the name to Applix Office Suite might not be a bad idea either. Anywhere is nothing short of confusing and I think if they test market that name they will discover it's horrible. Applix Office sounds good to me. If you have an effective office suite, why would you not want to take flood the market with it? Having done that, one would think that revenue opportunities would be growing on trees for Applix's other products, including additional beans for the office suite. Every suite that goes out the door beats a path that can be retravelled with follow-up products and services. How in the world are you going to compete with Lotus' eSuite?

To: mark smith who wrote (1940)	11/22/1997 6:06:00 AM
From: Kashish King	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3014

One other question I had was whether or not ELF was going to be thrown into the-last-thing-we-need or yet-another-language bucket and burned. Certainly that would make sense in light of Java and Java Script. Proprietary language systems have no place in an open environment. Proprietary languages are large billboards reading "real software engineers write their own language." This is never justified, IMO, and they should eliminate the "write a compiler" section from all educational curricula. Huge red flag. That concerns me.