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

To: Frederick Smart who wrote (11380)	10/17/1998 6:03:00 PM
From: Rusty Johnson	Respond to of 74651

You hit the nail on the head ... In addition Linux, still in its infancy, is gaining momentum and Sun Microsystems is on a roll. Bad news for Microsoft in the long run. I hope the Microsoftians continue to make money. But they should keep their eyes on the horizon because the sky is dark in the distance. Best of luck.

To: Frederick Smart who wrote (11380)	10/18/1998 1:53:00 AM
From: ToySoldier	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Thanks Fredrick, I had to take a day of rest off the boards. People like Keithsha were actually wearing me out - thats hard for me to believe (although I would like to thank keithsha for getting my technical blood going - hehehe). This battle between NT and NetWare is all fine and dandy - it basically comes down to the Technical superiority of NetWare vs the Marketing superiority behind NT. At this point in time the marketing is winning over the technology because many IT shop decision makers are holding on to the promises from MSFT to "Trust us - all those problems you now experience in NT4 and earlier will ALL go away in NT5". When NT5 eventually does roll out and the true colours of NT5 show, these shops will not be willing to wait for NT6 to save them from their woes. The biggest problem NT has is related to their Domain Structure which limits their penetration into the main stream of large enterprise shops. Anyone who knows anything about the depths of Directory Services knows that MSFT's Active Directory is being built on top of the same Domain Structures. Therefore, there will be nothing MSFT can do to hide these continued enterprise limitation woes from its customer base. The reason I mention this area in particular is that Novell's main thrust is not in pushing NetWare but to push hard to become the clear industry leader in Directory Services. NDS is currently the clear industry leader already, but until Active Directory makes its actual appearance and falls on its face publicly, there are still a very large number of IT Shops out there that are waiting from MSFT to prove that Active Directory will be everything NDS is currently. I have even heard comments from key Novell staff that said (paraphrased) "we truely believe that NetWare provides and will continue to provide clear advantages over its NT and Unix competitors, but, if in the future NetWare loses that advantage and value-add to the market, Novell will be willing to stop its NetWare development. That is because our internet and NDS products will continue on with the other platforms". The importance to these type of comments are that Novell is putting a lot of focus on diversifying their product revenue mix so that NetWare is not they large product in sales. Looking at Q to Q product revenue percentages you can see that they are being successful in this strategy. The product that Novell wants to see take up much of the revenue gain is NDS. NetWare will be a long term success for Novell, but with that being said, Novell is more interested in marketing the products that it does not have to directly compete against MSFT on or products that make MSFT's NT a better solution (and MSFT gives a lot of room for companies like Novell to do that). Toy