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

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (10372)	8/28/1998 9:13:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Dan - Good comments, but a few corrections are in order - Maybe after the "Win32 API" moved fully over to NT with NT4.0 Unfortunately not. The Win95 crew originally had convergence of Win32 APIs as a goal, but came to the conclusion early on that too many legacy programs (including games, 3rd party word processors, etc.) did not obey the rules, and would break. So they softened compliance to make most of the older programs work. So much for the 'MS breaks the competition' myth IMO - when they had a golden opportunity to hammer the standard, they chose instead (at considerable expense) to enable the vast majority of SW instead. There are still chunks of legacy X86 code but pretty much limited to 16 bit support, virtually all of the core is relatively modern 32 bit code. Win98 came closer on some key APIs but the transition will not be complete until NT5. As for NT running on PowerPC, I don't know much about PowerPC, but it might be pure big-endian while NT is little-endian only PowerPC is bi-endian, like Alpha, MIPS, and Intel's future Merced. NT supported PowerPC through NT 3.51 but there was never enough sales volume to justify the ongoing development expense. When MS asked IBM and Motorola to contribute more to the ongoing maintenance of NT on PowerPC, those folks declined, and so MS discontinued support for the chip in NT4. Palmer chose to use the threat of legal action to spur Microsoft into improving Alpha's prospects There were a number of areas in the NT code where digital could have claimed IP violations, primarily around MICA but some VMS ideas as well. The usual solution in these cases is a cross-license for the potentially infringing IP, but digital chose a harder line. I think both sides turned a sow's ear into a silk purse on this one. Digital got cash, training, and a lot of good press, but more importantly got a more significant role for Alpha and other digital technologies in the core MS development. MS got not only the rights to the original IP but also an ongoing injection of technology in several important areas. Among the benefits of this agreement was the development of digital's service capability on large Exchange installations, where they legitimized this technology at a time when MS did not have the expertise in the field to solve some of the large system problems. Digital (now CPQ) also gained hugely from this, as they now dominate the exchange installed base with more than 60% of the seats. More importantly, they are widely regarded by the MS field as the first, second and third choice for sales engagement, since with digital's service capability around NT and CPQ's dominant market position they have a much higher likelihood of making an enterprise deal stick. HP is a poor second in this race due primarily to conflicts around the PA-RISC HP/UX business.