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

To: John Koligman who wrote (32678)	9/10/1998 7:31:00 PM
From: Tweaker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

>>That might work for the first step in diagnosing a very simple PC problem,<, That is what it is for. . .very simple problems which account for a very large number of the calls for service. This frees up the technicians to work on the more complicated problems. The software is more sophisticated than you may think. Phil LONG ON CPQ AND DELL!

To: John Koligman who wrote (32678)	9/10/1998 7:42:00 PM
From: Elwood P. Dowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

cbs.marketwatch.com

To: John Koligman who wrote (32678)	9/10/1998 8:21:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 97611

John - Exactly right on services - most of the Dellheads don't understand the real issues, but several over there have a good grasp of what it will take. MSD is making lemonade out of the lemons he has for a service story. He has done a wonderful job on break-fix, the best in the industry, using mostly 3rd party support. Guess who - DEC. Dell is in the process of shifting to a variety of other providers, and CPQ now owns the resource that made Dell #1 in break-fix support. But as you say the real story is in pre-sales engineering, large contract outsourcing for IT transitions, ongoing systems analysis. Large firms come to depend on the company that can provide that capability. IBM has a good story there, HP is good but not first tier. DEC combined with CPQ has a very strong story - the best product line in the industry combined with the best service capability. I think we're seeing the beginning salvos from the real CPQ strategy. I have read several press pieces (including the one posted here) - it looks like CPQ was working behind the scenes to close a powerful deal with MSFT before tooting their horn. The real meat of this was presented at some analyst conference under NDA, but as far as I can tell from the press releases and analyst comments, CPQ has cut a deal with MSFT which puts DEC Unix in a special position WRT NT, and in a second deal, is going to work directly with MSFT on a future highly stable version of NT which incorporates technology from both Digital and Tandem. Some analysts have said this is the most significant technology deal Microsoft has done since the original IBM deals. The Unix piece gives customers the option of creating a combined NT / Unix environment with a single log-on, common security, and most importantly a common programming model through COM. This means companies who adopt this architecture can write programs which run equally well on either Unix or NT platforms, and users of those systems don't need to consider whether they are on a Unix or NT workstation, or whether their servers are Unix or NT based. Sun tried to do a 'blocking' announcement yesterday and today around their NT interoperability strategy, but no one will believe for a minute that Sun will be able to work with Microsoft. DEC had the capability Sun is talking about back in 1995 through their 'allconnect' program. The current agreement goes way beyond that in terms of a seamless environment. But the real meat is in the enterprise NT announcement. This agreement clearly places CPQ in a special development relationship with Microsoft around NT, something MSFT has not done since the 80's with IBM. Obviously, although MSFT will sell the resulting products to anyone, CPQ will have the inside track, especially if they are incorporating significant portions of Tandem and DEC technology. I would expect HP especially to be hopping mad, since they were trying to ride the fence between their Unix strategy, which was not very compatible with NT, and their desire to leverage their enterprise capability in the MSFT market. CPQ clearly figured out the weak spots in HP's position and skewered HP. Dell will also have a hard time telling a compelling story to customers about their enterprise capability when MSFT has chosen CPQ as the NT development partner. CPQ is leveraging their technology assets and their engineering capability to create a barrier to entry for Dell in enterprise NT accounts, the only kind that Dell can sell. But given the relatively soft sell that this has been given, I suspect that there is a lot more to come. CPQ is finally starting to play the game right IMO, build the foundation before putting up the house. This is the kind of thing CPQ built their business on - remember when Intel had production problems, and IBM delayed their 386 products because they wanted the next generation chips? CPQ engineered around the chip problems on the first-generation 386 parts and beat IBM to market with the first of the 32 bit PC's. IBM never recovered the technology lead. Feeling pretty good about hanging in with CPQ at the moment...