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

To: McClam who wrote (11255)	10/10/1998 10:53:00 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 74651

The situation at MS is culturally similar to the situation in 1991 when the new OS group for NT under Cutler was trying to impose development discipline and the traditional free-wheeling MSFT teams were fighting any restrictions on their freedom. That time, MSFT managed to get to a much more controlled development model without losing the broad freedoms that most of the individual teams enjoyed. A big part of that was that the NT team demonstrated that more structured methods got better results faster. The current situation is more complex mostly because the company is so much bigger. But my sense is that the senior management, particularly Maritz, are working methodically to develop the infrastructure not just to solve today's problems but the coming challenges, by both hiring experienced technical leaders and developing technical and business leaders from within. MSFT seems to be very good at understanding themselves, better than any other technical company I have been involved with. However hard some of the detractors on this thread may be on MSFT's weaknesses, the internal MSFT management is harder yet. They understand what they can and can not do and they rarely waste significant effort in tilting at windmills. I believe that they will continue development of a very professional high end software team, with the results showing fruit mostly in the 2000-2003 timeframe. In the meantime they will scramble to execute on current product plans using 'classic Microsoft' methods (everybody work like Hell, buy what you can't build). As a result I am fairly bullish short term and very bullish long term on both company prospects and stock price.