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

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (10381)	8/29/1998 2:02:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Dan - We have yet to see what CPQ will really do with Alpha, but they are saying the right things and they certainly have the market clout to move Alpha in volumes that DEC never dreamed of. It is almost certain that Alpha will have a significant speed edge over the first several versions of merced/McKinley if CPQ maintains the development schedules. But no one doubts that Intel will eventually set the pace at least in terms of market penetration, so CPQ will have to work a strategy that assures a foot in both worlds, no easy task. The 16 bit legacy is an indicator of just how far MS has come in the last 10 years. in the late 80's they had almost no significant apps and made their bread and butter in platform and tools products, so they could hardly alienate the DOS base. So windows had to support DOS at a fundamental level. Each iteration since then has dragged all of that legacy baggage along. NT has always provided a more limited but more robust support for DOS, requiring that the apps more or less play by the rules. It will be interesting to see if they can maintain that stance as the old WinXX platoform heads into the sunset. I think DEC Unix is still based on the Mach kernal, and has the OSF heritage, but otherwise has become a 'standard' Unix (if there is such a thing). Interestiong that Rick Rashid who developed Mach at CMU is now on the MSFT research team... DEC may have gotten more than you suspect in the Intel deal. From discussion on the Intel thread, I understand that Intel has committed to produce Alpha using their most current process thechnology, which puts Alpha fab ahead of where it would have been under DEC (since Intel is investing a lot more in .18 and .13 process than DEC could have done). Also the hudson fab was a money pit for DEC since they did not have enough volume to make it pay off. But no question Intel got a good deal too.