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

To: Still Rolling who wrote (7506)	6/18/1998 9:47:00 AM
From: Mark Finger	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 19080

>>Could somebody who knows the business from the inside look at some >>of these predictions by the Seybold Group and present some >>counterpoints. On this, I would like to point out that the typical Microsoft strategy is FUD. That is, make a lot of claims, whether they are supportable or not, about how the next release is going to take over the world, and that anyone else will be crushed, so the customers had better switch to Microsoft now. It appears that Seybold may have fallen for some of this. The core of this is that Microsoft has a lot of features and will have low prices. Note that nothing is said about performance and scalability. Now to handle each of these areas. First, Microsoft features. Microsoft is very good at claiming a lot of features in the "checkmark" battle. in the past, many of the features (when the product is finally shipped) were very shallow (just enough that they can claim a feature). In other words, be very careful about the feature claims of vaporware, and that is exactly what SQL Server 7.0 is right now. Second, low prices. This has been the point of Microsoft to date. However, Microsoft is trying to move upstream with its Enterprise pricing, and that may not be as competitive. Further, one of the real keys is to consider is what it actually takes in hardware and software to implement a total solution. Microsoft is often not as flexible or innovative on the way it can build a total solution, and I have seen situations where companies that had higher software costs come in and really beat Microsoft on total costs (especially with a Unix solution). Third--performance and scalability. This is not mentioned but seems to be assumed. However, if the solutions are so good, WHERE ARE THE INDEPENDENT BENCHMARKS????? The product should be far enough along to start producing those. The lack of mention here and in many other cases seems to be a real lack. At this point, MS seems still to be a solution for the low-end warehouse, where performance is not important, but turn-key is. This may be important for VAR markets where they can prepackage some standard setups. However, because of the level of expertise needed to build and manage data warehouses, I wonder about the size of the low-end market outside pre-packaged VAR solutions. Mark

To: Still Rolling who wrote (7506)	6/18/1998 12:22:00 PM
From: lml	Respond to of 19080

Re: Seybold Article Craig: After reading the first assertion, which I immediately viewed as rather bold & not very objective, I concluded this was typical MSFT hype & not remotely representative of true journalistic reporting & analysis. Reading further on, particularly onto supporting claims 2 thru 5, my reaction of a bold assertion elevated to one of absurdity. Finally, upon finishing this MSFT "wish list," & first recognizing the name Patricia Seybold attached this BS (the Seybold name didn't click for me at first), the whole thing became crystal clear. I caught her in a CNBC interview several months ago. She is the most biased, non-objective rah! rah! supporter of MSFT I've ever seen among technical journalists -- if that's what one can call her. She is a close friend of Bill Gates; appears to be a nice person, but unabashedly in love with Mr. Softy & his empire. If MSFT controls or influence any people in the press, she is DEFINITELY at the top of the list. Needless to say, her bread & butter rests entirely in promoting MSFT. As far as the author, he's not very confident in his "wish list," is he? Why else would he spend time on a ORCL thread soliciting counter arguments to these ridiculous crap. He'd rather receive the abuse here than from others in the press. I say, leave it his peers in the press to discredit his claims.