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

To: stak who wrote (11259)	10/10/1998 3:27:00 AM
From: mozek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Stak, I'm surprised that your asking Cheryl since she works for Sun. If you don't mind an opinion from someone who might have an idea... My honest opinion is that I think Microsoft knows what they need to do with NT 5.0. Sun, Novell, and others are scared s***less that it'll be a raging success, and I believe it will. You don't think the lawsuits are about Java and value for consumers do you? It will take a huge effort to finish making NT 5.0 as reliable as it needs to be, and that's the work that's going on at MSFT every day. Will it be reliable out of the gate? I believe so. Will there be a service pack? Probably so. Even though Sun would have you believe that Solaris is perfectly reliable, they also have service packs or OS patches, etc. Even if it takes until after 2000 for NT 5.0 to really take off in the marketplace (and I mean REALLY take off), NT will continue to take market share away from Sun and other Unix vendors. Just to give you an idea of what's happening now, according to IntelliQuest, 56% of intranet web apps are NT server based and 70% of new intranets are built with NT server. According to Netcraft, 50% of the new eCommerce sites being built are based on NT Server and IIS. These numbers are quite respectable, and that's all pre-NT 5.0. Even if NT 5.0 doesn't completely overtake the market until after 2000, a lot's going to happen before then. There's Office 2000 and always the occasional Microsoft surprise. I know Linux is an excellent system, and while it does have RAS, I don't think it's going to catch up to NT in usability. NT on the other hand will be as reliable and scalable as any Unix on the market. Of course, I work for Microsoft, and you might consider me biased even though I'm really expressing my honest opinion. If you want an unbiased opinion from someone outside the company, I think Rudedog's posts have been closest to the mark. Mike

To: stak who wrote (11259)	10/12/1998 4:16:00 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

stak, IF, NT 5.0 isn't ready for prime time as soon as it is released, when would it be ready for the enterprise market to really be considered bulletproof I can't answer that question. High-quality O/S's take years to develop & test. Working bugs out is a MAJOR undertaking & MSFT is not used to supporting enterprise customers. It's out of their league right now. They would have to rely on CPQ or other OEM's to take care of the support which opens up another can of worms. IA-64 is a qualitatively different architecture & requires a complete re-write from 32-bits. MSFT could probably do it, but until their 32-bit OS is on a level to compete with Linux, there's no point considering it. I was involved in HP's effort to port HPUX to IA-64 and I can tell you that it is quite an undertaking. Unix has the advantage of age: it has been tested & used by thousands of propeller-heads since the early days (80's) so it is very, very stable. I, personally would take FreeBSD over any MSFT O/S, any day of the week, if for no other reason than the stability. My sense is that MSFT is really an applications software company. They think in terms of features & nice presentation graphics etc... They have never even come up to the level of Novell in file server technology, let alone enterprise servers. Why would a product mgr. allow a NEW O/S project grow to 30+ million lines of code?? Bulletproof usually means small, tight, and very powerful at the same time. They're crazy if they think that they need all that code to be as powerful as Linux, which is about 1/15th that size. What are they doing, anyway?? Maybe marketing has taken the place of common sense. MSFT's marketing has always been application-oriented. They're probably trying to pollute the NT code with hundreds of features that will sell this O/S to the unwitting, untrained, and not- real-bright customer. Talking paper clips, cute graphics that make it "easy-to-use" etal... I can't say I really know exactly what they have in mind, but if NT 4 is any indicator, it is going to be too big, too slow, no RAS, poorly scaled, and not ready for anywhere but the workgroup. BTW, I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT began announcing that they are porting some of their applications to Unix (Linux probably) in the near future. They're smart enough to hedge their bets in an increasingly competitive market. cheers, cherylw