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

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (8850)	7/1/1998 3:05:00 PM
From: johnd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Reginald, In one of your earlier posting you marketing spending is an investment and should be added to the bottom line. That is the first time I heard that argument. I always believed R&D spending adds to growth flow and is a contributor to future profit from a future product. Why does marketing spending be considered an investment. How is it different from Admin cost. That way everything is an investment, includig the money spent on cost of good sold. If your arguemnt is that today's marketing spending would produce tomorrows large revenues, then I see your arguemnt, but don't like it. The reason for that is that if MSFT is a real monopoly then it shold generate max revenues, profit and increase in equity with the least possible marketing spending. johnd

To: Reginald Middleton who wrote (8850)	7/1/1998 5:22:00 PM
From: ToySoldier	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Ahh Reginald, you may not have a good understanding of Directory Services. comparing Active Directory to NDS is like comparing BMW to a Chevette. MSFT is going through the evolution of DS where NOVL went througha bout 5 years ago. MSFT believes (as did NOVL when they first released NNS for Bidery Services) that if they simply fix the problems that the customer complains the most about Domains that they now have an enterprise DS. NOT!!! NDS is currently the largest DS player in the industry. It has 90% commitment from the Unix platform players. It is a mature X.500 superset DS that has had most of the bugs worked out of it. In order to be in this position, NOVL had to (fire trial and fire) realize that they fixing the bindery system wasnt going to work. So they bit the bullet and developed NDS from the ground up to be a truly enterprise-capable DS. Active Directory is a year away. And when it finally does get released the industry will quickly realize that the Active Directory is not much more of an improvement than domains. In fact most industry techies already know it. Even if it does catch on, LDAP and/or a direct gateway to Active Directory will allow NDS to tie into any small scale Active Directory customers. Im sure that some truly loyal MSFT shops will try to implement Active Directory at any cost to their company, but many will quickly realize that its far easier and cheaper to use a true Enterprise DS that has already lived through all the pains. Finally, MSFT is so worried about NDS that Gate and Schmidt have had discussions (and they even met privately in Washington last week) likely to discuss NDS and NT. MSFT themselves stated that one company that they are worried about is NOVL. but it is very hard to convey the differences and the reasons why Active Directory will be a mediocre flop. But it will. My prediction, look for some relationship being forged whereby MSFT agrees to work more closely with NOVL on the DS technology. I think the DOJ case makes this prediction more possible because MSFT must appear to be willing to work more friendly with others. So, its more than worth gambling that NDS will win out on Active Directory. We will see wont we. Toy