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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FR1 who wrote (26844)	5/31/1998 3:13:00 AM
From: mozek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Franz, Microsoft does have an x86 emulation product as part of the NT for alpha. It's quite a bit slower than a high speed Pentium, but it does run Intel software. If key applications ran natively, software availability probably wouldn't be a big issue. Mike

To: FR1 who wrote (26844)	5/31/1998 10:37:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Franz - Good questions, and in fact the same ones the FTC and SEC have been asking. Relative to Fab - if Intel is the only producer, they can do exactly what you say, and it would be easy for them to just have 'production problems' or whatever. That's why the FTC wanted a guarantee of at least 2 other Fab partners for Alpha. Now if Intel ups the price the business just goes to Samsung or IBM. Samsung seems to be driving hard to be the top Alpha producer anyway. Your second point is also exactly right. If MSFT does not provide support for Alpha that makes the product truly transparent for IT users, then Alpha will not make it. But CPQ must generate real volume to interest MSFT. It looks like both sides are moving in that direction, we'll just have to watch the activity over the next few months to see if it is really happening. As far as "Anything that runs on Intel will run on Alpha." that is pretty much true for NT already, thanks to native Alpha ports of the key server applications, and FX!32 for those that are still native IA32 code. MSFT has already publicly committed to make FX!32 a part of the base NT5 package, so for the NT world that guarantee will probably hold.