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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brian Moore who wrote (8652)	10/13/1998 8:59:00 AM
From: Michael Olin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

Just a hunch, but is the NASDAQ site running on Alpha NT (as is Terraserver) or Intel NT? Once you move into the Alpha arena, the "low cost" argument for NT gets pretty shaky. If you look at the configuration Microsoft has posted for their Terraserver site (there is a link on the first page, I think) you will see a killer machine. I could run a few small countries with that kind of power and it is not $5,000 Intel/NT boxes. As far as billions and billions of small databases goes: How does that make the situation any better than when everyone had their data in a Lotus or Excel "database" on their desktop. Does that mean that each user will maintain a table of customers or state abbreviations or zip codes in their own local database? How will this solve the problem of inconsistent, redundant data? Does Bill plan to have just some of the data local and the rest (customer lists, etc.) on centralized servers? The bandwidth necessary to support that makes Larry's internet database look small footprint. Client/server is dying a slow, painful death. Moore's Law spawned it (cheap, fast clients everywhere) and Moore's Law is killing it (cheap, faster centralized servers). Microsoft is not going to be able to count on the corporate desktop as a cash cow forever. -Michael

To: Brian Moore who wrote (8652)	10/13/1998 10:33:00 AM
From: Hardly B. Solipsist	Respond to of 19080

> I'm an Oracle fan, but we should not discount Microsoft. I don't believe that I am discounting them. I expect that even if I am right, and their strategy is flawed, they will realize it at some point and change to a new and better one. They are much more flexible and quicker to react (at least sometimes) than seems likely for a company of that size. ORCL has to perform better than they have in recent years to stay ahead (this assumes, as I do, that they are headed in a better direction). I think that questions about ORCL's ability to do this are a big part of why the stock price is where it is, but it could mean that it's also a chance to make some money.