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

To: SC who wrote (28272)	6/27/1998 10:32:00 AM
From: Jack T. Pearson	Respond to of 97611

Sounds like a big failure of cooperation between Microsoft and Compaq. It's astonishing that this problem wasn't found and corrected during Beta testing.

To: SC who wrote (28272)	6/27/1998 10:52:00 AM
From: Lynn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

I agree with what Jack just said (#28277). Truly amazing that MSFT did not realize that some of the computers of one of their largest, maybe largest PC maker, had problems with Win 98. Something hits me here as very, very wrong. What's going to be interesting to watch--and I do not mean 'interesting' in a positive way--is whether the 'bad guy' is going to be perceived by Joe Public as MSFT or CPQ. Call it a gut reaction, but if a lot of Presario owners can not use Win 98 on their present machines and for some reason, they feel they can not live without Win 98 so go shopping for a new computer, I seriously question whether they will automatically buy a new Compaq, even if they really liked their machine before the Win 98 problem. What remains to be seen is if the consumer model offerings of other PC makers have the same problem or if it is merely Compaq's. If Compaq stands alone, this is not good. As a shareholder I am not happy. CPQ corporate headquarters should be furious--and talk to their lawyers about their 'friend' MSFT. Lynn

To: SC who wrote (28272)	6/27/1998 12:23:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

Shawn - I don't know if this is anecdotal evidence. According to an engineer in the CPQ Consumer test certification group, Presarios dating back to 3Q '95 were sent to the MSFT certification team (several of each). Another set went to CPQ's Redmond test lab. An additional set went to the Houston certification lab. CPQ verified that all of these machines could upgrade from Win95 to Win98, and also that they could successfully install Win98 to a newly formatted disk (since many people apparently upgrade by cleaning out the disk and doing a fresh install). Microsoft worked aggressively to resolve bugs that showed up in beta 2 (mostly plug and play problems) to assure that the Presario base, the largest windows base in the consumer market, would see a trouble-free installation. When one considers the tens of millions of Presarios in the market, it would not be unusual to expect that some individual users would have problems with the install, either because they have changed hardware settings to different ones than the original factory settings, installed third-party hardware that CPQ did not support on the platform, or other typical user behaviors. It is a rule of thumb that the user does not tell you the crucial piece of information that explains the problem (like after 3 hours of debug when the user says 'well I did install this video capture board that I bought in 1991, that wouldn't cause any problems would it?'). CPQ is MSFT's most important partner. CPQ has more than 400 people on site at Redmond, way more than any other vendor (IBM is second with about 70 people, Dell has less than 20 since they count on Intel to do much of their certification verification). Let's not let an anecdotal sample of 5 or 10 people out of 10 million create a false impression. If 1 out of 1000 people experience a problem, that would generate tens of thousands of service calls given the installed base.