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

To: nnillionaire who wrote (5841)	4/19/1998 6:11:00 PM
From: Brian Malloy	Respond to of 74651

Well written balanced article talking about Unix and NT. I have copied some of the inital and last paragraphs in the article. For those that "do their own research" on MSFT, this is a must read. The full article link is at the end of this post. Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT Server continues to evolve as an enterprise-level operating system, but it's still playing second fiddle to Unix. Despite the claims trumpeted last May at Microsoft's Scalability Day, NT isn't likely to fill all your network operating system needs until some time in the next century. Enterprises are deploying NT at an ever-increasing rate, but in its traditional supporting role as a file and print and applications server. Unix is still the star of the strategic systems show, thanks to superior scalability, reliability and management talents. "At the enterprise level, we don't see NT playing at all right now,'' says Mike Prince, chief information officer (CIO) for Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp., in Burlington, N.J. "The stability and scalability of Unix really precludes our use of NT in that space. NT just isn't there yet.'' But Microsoft keeps working at the enterprise level relentlessly, unwilling to concede any part of the high-margin operating system business. Clearly, the same economic weapons that won Microsoft the desktop - commodity hardware and ease of use and development - are rapidly securing for NT the crucial middle tier, where most business-logic programming takes place. Microsoft's success here is forcing even the most committed Unix shops to deploy some NT servers. One is Nicholas-Applegate Group, an investment banker in San Diego. The company would rather stick strictly to Unix, but it isn't possible anymore. "Microsoft is definitely getting the middleware,'' says David Buckley, global Unix systems manager for Nicholas-Applegate. "It's why we're running a few things on NT.'' A matter of time To move into the top tier of the enterprise application arena, Microsoft needs to scale its business model up alongside NT. The company is geared toward selling millions of cheap desktop units anonymously through a distribution channel. In the Unix market, a single enterprise system might cost $5 million and would involve an ongoing service and support relationship with the customer. For now, "it is frankly not our goal to compete with the top 1% to 2% of scalable systems,'' says Mark Hassel, NT server product manager at Microsoft. Meanwhile, count on the Unix community to keep raising the technological bar.Much of what ails NT is simply its age. Unix has been maturing for decades while 5-year-old NT is barely out of the toddler stage. "NT is a good body of code with good features, but it has to be out there much longer before people can really analyze its behavior in an enterprise environment,'' PSW's Lowe says. Message 4120731