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

To: Rusty Johnson who wrote (11734)	10/24/1998 4:22:00 AM
From: mozek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Rusty, Thanks for the flamboyant anti-Microsoft article. A few days back, I quipped to Toy about his obsessive Novell plugs and made some snyde comment about the unimportance of Novell. Toy responded with an attempt at reverse psych and suggested that I should stay complacent (which I'm actually not) and assume Novell was no threat. You want to know why Microsoft haters and companies focused on beating Microsoft rather than continuing innovation don't win? Because their religion prevents them from seeing the truth. They continue to believe the fallacy that Microsoft wins only by trickery, that there's no substance to Microsoft's innovation, and that they must beat Microsoft to be successful. The truth is that Microsoft is shrewd, but they don't win by trickery. If I say that Microsoft outdoes the competition by innovation, raw development ability, breadth of experience, and listening to customers, I'm sure I'll get blasted by Microsoft bashers. Want to know a secret? Not only is it true, but the religion that refuses to acknowledge it prevents the religious from beating Microsoft. Microsoft won't win against Linux in the market through some underhanded maneuvering. Microsoft will win because they will deliver a serviceable, reliable NT server with high availability that will deliver much more value for customers than Linux. Will customers pay for that value? You bet. Will Microsoft support their platform better than Linux vendors? Count on it. I don't really expect Microsoft bashers like Michael Swaine to believe me. Most of them probably never will. Most of them will ignore things like Barksdale hosting Joel Klein at his home for breakfast and call Microsoft a dirty player. Most of them will dismiss Microsoft's technical ability as second rate. Funny thing is that underestimation of Microsoft is exactly why Sun ended up in a desparate, last resort attempt to sue Microsoft with hope they could rewrite the agreement. Just look at some of the information that's come to light in the Sun lawsuit: In a Fall, 1996, e-mail to Sun Vice President, Jon Kannegaard, David Spenhoff, then-director of Java product marketing, wrote: "Microsoft were smarter than us when we did the contract. They did contemplate that our interests in evolving the platform would conflict with theirs, and they put language in place that not only protected their interests but also inhibited our ability to drive significant new functionality that is not purely bolt-on to the existing Java Classes. Sun: We were out-negotiated "What I find most annoying is that no one at Sun saw this coming. I don't think our folks who negotiated and agreed to these terms understood at the time what they meant," Spenhoff wrote. "The really scary thing about the meeting was how much effort they're putting into it," said an unatributed e-mail cited by Microsoft. "They're not using our VM at all, they're using the one that they wrote from scratch, along with our class files. The clause in the contract which requires them to send source back (which they're happy to do) isn't going to be real useful since it bears no relation to ours ..." I think Linux will be a great placeholder until NT 5.0 really cooks. I believe that Linux will get better, and I think it will occupy an important part of the market for a while. I also believe that Microsoft will provide compelling value in Windows and people will pay for it. The company that should worry most about Linux and the bottom line is Sun. Linux strikes at the center of their existing market and runs just fine on reasonably-priced, Intel based servers. Thanks, Mike