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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tech Master who wrote (6769)	4/4/1998 8:20:00 PM
From: TideGlider	Respond to of 19080

For what it is worth here is another WSJ article. I believe it isn't all that bad. The stock reaction was over done. Another Blow Delivered To Network Computing - WSJ ****Another Blow Delivered To Network Computing - WSJ 04/03/98 NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, U.S.A., 1998 APR 3 (NB) -- By Bob Woods, Newsbytes. Network computing (NC), which is being sold by Sun Microsystems [NASDAQ:SUNW], Oracle [NASDAQ:ORCL], Netscape [NASDAQ:NSCP], IBM [NYSE:IBM] and others, took another hit in the credibility department Friday, after the Wall Street Journal published a story saying that private sector companies that had signed on to buy NCs for their businesses are now switching over to conventional personal computers (PCs). The piece came on the heels of a study released Thursday that characterized NC shipments as being "disappointing." FDX Corp., the parent company of Federal Express (FedEX), looked beyond Sun and its NCs to choose PCs and Windows-based terminals from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Wyse Technology to replace as many as 30,000 NCs, the Journal said. Sun's black eye regarding this particular deal must have stung a bit more than other contracts, because FedEx was featured in a Sun video touting the NC. The Journal also said that First Union and CSX also recently switched from NCs to PCs. Companies like Sun and IBM had hoped that in combining the NC, Sun's Java programming language and the Internet, Intel's and Microsoft's near-domination of profits in the high-tech industry would be broken. Sun does claim some success stories, the Journal said. PHP Healthcare, based in Reston, Va., recently announced that it will deploy 500 network computers for use with Java software. On Thursday, market researcher Dataquest said network computer (NC) shipments reached just 144,040 units last year, despite the intensive hype as a low-cost replacement for desktop PCs (Newsbytes, Apr. 2, 1998). The Gartner Group subsidiary also said the market will probably not reach economically significant levels before the year 2000, but a trend toward net-centric applications may have profound implications for the market as we reach beyond 2000. Dataquest said the NC market may more than triple to 482,196 units in 1998, but it will still disappoint boosters of the NC model of computing. Slow sales can be tracked to lateness of products to market, fading interest from key parties, plummeting PC prices and the possible emergence of Windows terminals, the analysts said. Tom Austin, vice president of Gartner Group's intranets & electronic workplace and network computing client/server programs, talked about Java computers as having fallen into a "Trough of Disillusionment" due to over-promotion. But Dataquest analyst Kimball Brown said it was silly for thin-client boosters to think companies would deploy the hardware before compatible software was ready. With the advent of Java and an evolving HTML (hypertext markup language), Brown told Newsbytes the picture is now changing. The real growth in server-based computing may be the growing area of extranets, where Java shows signs of coming into its own as system buyers find value in them. Oracle's Larry Ellison, though, is quoted by the Journal as saying that his predictions for a successful NC platform are being realized through sales of Internet-equipped phones and other products. Reported By Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com .