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Technology Stocks : Y2K (Year 2000) Stocks: An Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Josef Svejk who wrote (9152)	1/23/1998 8:50:00 PM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13949

Svejk, re evangelists and Apple as a Y2K play... Did you know that employees at MSFT are called evangelists? It even says so on their business cards. That's why it is sort of funny that these Apple lovers have "borrowed" the term for their own use. Both PCs and Macs sold today, I am pretty sure, are Y2K compliant. I think it is also safe to say that Macs were compliant much earlier than PCs. Thus, if a micro needs to be replaced in the Year 2000, it will most likely be a PC and not a Mac. Ironically, this makes Wintel companies a better Y2K play than Macs since Wintel users are the ones forced to shell out the extra bucks and I would bet most buy another PC! However, since we all know how expensive it is to fix Y2K problems on mainframes, and since the money has to come from somewhere, perhaps a better case could be made that microcomputer companies might see a decline in revenues if corporate America is forced to divert money from related purchasing accounts. Database companies like Oracle and Sybase are already reporting Y2K is the reason their earnings tanked last quarter. - Jeff

To: Josef Svejk who wrote (9152)	1/23/1998 10:25:00 PM
From: David Eddy	Respond to of 13949

Michal - do any of you think that AAPL may be a sort of y2k play? With the latest developments in the company, the fact that Macs are said to be y2k compliant Actually it's an excellent idea... however there are some gottchas :-( Regarding the "y2k compliant" part of Macs... while the native operating system date calls are indeed Y2Kok, such niceties do not force developers to either use those date calls or then handle dates properly within the application. Bottom line is that it is no more difficult to have written Y2Kbad apps for a Mac than for a PC or a mainframe. I know for a fact one very popular cross platform (DOS, Win, Mac) app which is built on xBase has (could now have been fixed in fresher release than what I saw last year) serious Y2K issues. And YES, if Jobs & Co put their heads in the right place they potentially could make a very nice Y2K message for Mac... unfortunately, Jobs is a marketing guy & not technical. Last year I was lucky enough to have Mary Farrell ask Jobs on Wall Street Week about Y2K... Jobs blew it away as a mainframe problem that would cost a few "tens of millions of dollars". He might wake up, but somehow I think his available bandwidth is already taken. BTW... I just bought my 5th Mac. - David