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

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (11009)	9/25/1998 11:39:00 AM
From: ToySoldier	Respond to of 74651

Here is a reader's letter to the editor responding to a recent PCWeek columnist's opinions on who should and shouldnt consider implementing Novell's latest NetWare 5, Enhanced NDS, and Zenworks.... Michael, I am a bit suprised that PCWeek allowed your highly myopic and unintelligent drivel to clutter the pages of their publication this week. I am referring to the unbelievably closed-minded paragraphs that made the Labs-Eye View on page 77 in the 9/14 issue. As an IT manager, I can assure you that anyone who thinks as you do will shortly find themselves out of work in the marketplace - which is where things actually happen (not in a cozy little lab full of free stuff that vendors give you so that you say nice things about them). For you to recommend that people who have made the mistake of NT servers and domains to manage their enterprise file and print services simply stay put and keep the faith for the next 18 months, until what will be the 1.0 version of ADS ships, is pure insanity. Anyone with working brain cells can pick up the phone and call one of about 40,000 channel partners Novell has, and get instant assistance integrating NT with Novell and NDS. It's easy, and it works exceptionally well. Of course, when you sit in a lab all day, beta versions of OS'es must appear to be the shipping product and bug-free. Which is the only explanation possible for the idiotic statement of yours that reads "NetWare has long excelled at file-and-print and directory services, but the recent release of Windows NT Beta 2 shows that NetWare isn't the only NOS that can provide these capabilities." If I were you, I wouldn't send my resume to any of the companies who support any part of the 80,000,000 nodes of NetWare's installed base that read this magazine - for simple fear of receiving a letter bomb by return-mail. While it is true that Novell has never purported to be an application server competitor in the past, their future direction (big secret here by the way...try attending Brainshare or reading any of the million articles PCWeek has written regarding Novell's future direction) is to host native Web services and database services by way of Oracle. That point aside, anyone who can look at themselves in the mirror while arguing that "NT 5 Beta 2" can be preceeded by the word "release" in the sense that it is suddenly a "shipping product" needs psycotherapy. The truth is that anyone foolish enough to bet their enterprise on NT5.0 and ADS should learn to flip burgers and ask "Would you like fries with that?" People such as yourself who think this is good advice to give, should probably start practicing their burger-flipping skills now. I'd hate to think what other "advice" you've given in your columns - I can imagine what the headlines must have read. "Use SMS to solve all your TCO woes". Maybe, "Who needs NDS? Use domains to manage users now!" One could assume you get regular checks endorsed by Microsoft for continuing to proliferate such utter nonsense in the pages of this magazine. A production network environment can't wait for any vendor - much less wait for Microsoft to re-invent the wheel. It needs to do business every single day. It needs to do it as fast and as cheap as possible, but it also needs to maintain 100% or greater up-time. It is by absolutely intolerant of poor decisions by IT managers who implement untested, unproven back-end systems. Production environments are 24x7. They cannot go down. They must be flexible to change immediately if the business needs it to. When production environments aren't run efficiently or experience down-time, two very bad things happen. 1) The company looses business. 2) The employees loose money. By reading your column, it doesn't appear you've ever had 2,400 pissed-off customers looking at you when their systems have frozen with a customer on the phone. We use a directory now (today!) to manage 2,400 desktops and over 300 applications centrally. We didn't have to wait until the millenium to do it, and it works. It will continue to work, and evolve, long before the first iteration of ADS ever sees the light of a production day. And while people who rush to implement ADS fret with the same directory problems Novell had with NDS 1.0, people running NetWare will be doing more business, faster, and for less money. The best advice you could have given is that "If you've ever thought about NetWare (even in your sleep), now is the time to implement it. By the time NT 5.0 comes out in late '99 (read Jesse Berst or your own magazine if you disagree), you'll be ready to integrate it seamlessly into a mature directory while taking advantage of its application-server feature set." Now then, since apparently anyone can give free advice (which is what it's always worth), here's some for you. ADVICE: Until you've actually held a job managing a medium-to-large enterprise environment, don't give stupid advice to people about how to do their jobs in any magazine columns you may or may not be writing.

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (11009)	9/25/1998 11:41:00 AM
From: ToySoldier	Respond to of 74651

I just wanted to prove to the board that I can talk about other topics other than Canadian Healthcare and Gun Laws... LOL!! Toy

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (11009)	9/25/1998 12:14:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Bill - General purpose vs. specialized processors You are paraphrasing Gordon Bell's rule #28, 'general purpose MIPS are always cheaper than special purpose MIPS to do any given job'. But we are not talking about special processors or even limited-function OS here. My microwave oven example may have been a little facetious but the idea that a well designed consumer system which comes equipped with 50 applications which do most everything a home user would want to do, for $399, is not. And unless MS makes a big shift in strategy those systems will not be running windows anything. Linux (as an example) is a general purpose OS which can run many thousands of applications. If a home user can do web browsing, word processing, spreadsheet calculations, email, home digital photography, etc. all from a standard out of the box computer appliance, with no setup, no driver hassles, compatibility with Microsoft (and other) office programs, and no problems connecting to the net, many will find that a completely satisfying experience, especially if the equivalent wintel based machine is twice the price and 4 times the hassle. I am not predicting the end of the Wintel dynasty here, but I am saying that millions of new systems may be sold as soon as next year that are outside of the wintel paradigm. And that provides the mechanism and market volume to drive applications that can interact with the wintel world without being a part of it. I am very familiar with both the embedded NT initiatives and what's happening with CE. Neither addresses this other market.