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

To: Andy Thomas who wrote (8875)	7/2/1998 8:46:00 AM
From: ToySoldier	Respond to of 74651

I agree Andy, I would dispute to some extent the OS life cycle theory. MVS is an old and very mature OS for Mainframe systems. IBM is developing other OSs for their S390 platform (like OS390) which is basically AIX for the mainframe. But MVS is far from reaching the scrap-heap. Old OSs evolve to meet new requirements. Its like comparing the Corvette of the 60's to the Corvette of the 90s - put them side-by-side and they are almost completely different cars yet they are both Corvettes. As for NT, 5 years is about the right amount of time that it will take for NT to be accepted as an Enterprise - High Availability - Stable OS for Mission Critical solutions. Right now to meet these requirements for the distributed Application world, Unix and AS400 are still the favoured platforms; for File & Print NetWare is still the favoured platform. NT can deliver smaller scale departmental solutions quite effectively where the above criteria is not important. As for the market not caring - maybe he is right but I will requote what MSFT senior staff have stated about the importance of the success of NT5 - "We are betting the farm on NT5". So if NT5 doesnt catch on for 1+ years after its release, I would have to guess that the markets and MSFT do care. Toy

To: Andy Thomas who wrote (8875)	7/2/1998 9:03:00 AM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

OT: MVS MVS (aka "OS/390") is the prime example of a senile operating system. Note that senility does not imply that an OS is no longer used. Rather it means that it has reached its full potential and is now in decline. How many new installs did MVS achieve last year? How many CS students and IS professionals are signing up to be trained on it? Is there anyone outside of the gray-temple set who even knows what JCL is? Software dies because the young move on to other, newer, platforms. The RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability for those under 40) features required for enterprise-class computing that MVS pioneered are only now starting to show up in UNIX and will be part of NT in a few years. But each OS is a product of its era. MVS was optimized for an era of extremely expensive hardware which required the skilled intermediation of a priesthood-like programmer class. UNIX was optimized for an era in which hardware was still expensive and software was an academic research tool which embodied the ideas of a thousand Ph.D. theses. NT is being optimized for an era of cheap hardware and widespread computer literacy. Each approaches the RAS problem in a different way.