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

To: DavesM who wrote (3502)	7/17/1998 5:01:00 PM
From: art slott	Respond to of 8219

Dave, that figure includes a bunch of unhappy Win 98 users. Most people thought Msft was #1 in software. Regards, Art Slott

To: DavesM who wrote (3502)	7/17/1998 5:10:00 PM
From: Arrow Hd.	Respond to of 8219

Reading your post caused me to reflect on other milestones where IBM was relegated to second place but eventually rebounded. The early 80s when Wang supplanted IBM as the word processing king, and then later in the 80s when "DEC had it all" and was king in mini-computers while Cray was the teraflop boss of the super computer gang, and so on. When you are in a purchase only business and in one market segment you live on the edge. The pressure to perform at MSFT has to be enormous to keep this ball rolling and I am not going to predict that it will fail anytime soon or at all. But if we incur a major downturn, maybe due to Y2K disasters, where consumer PCs now become a discretionary purchase, and corporate customers go to Network Computers that require no operating system, it would not take much for MSFT to be back in second place. Though IBM would get hit too a lot of their software is enterprise oriented and is licensed with recurring monthly revenue so the IBM software mix is more resilient to a major downturn.