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Technology Stocks : IFMX - Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeff Meredith who wrote (12195)	10/25/1998 8:43:00 PM
From: treetopflier	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14631

Hi Jeff. Yes Oracle8 took forever. Its just a number anyway, 8. It came in installments about a year apart - 7.1, 7.2, 7.3... 7 was even slower in coming. Almost put ORCL out of business. Damn SYBS and Transact SQL anyway. Have to agree they look pretty fixated on MSFT. Probably worth some attention. And the apps need to be Web ready. Thats as far as the agreement goes. If you think ORCL doesn't focus a lot of attention on its core product you are dead wrong. Everything ORCL does starts there. And everything they build relys on it. They'll probably spend more on R&D for kernel and related enhancements this year than what IFMX will net in revenue for the next 2 years. Now just how many people do you think IFMX has working on their virtual equivalent of 8i? What will IFMX's R&D expenditure for this year be? Do you know? Chances are it will be less overall that what ORCL is probably spending to fix it's 'P.O.S.' apps. And that is only one ORCL division. Is IFMX matching ORCL's tools R&D expenditures? Or its CASE R&D expenditures? How about middleware or business intelligence tools? Think IFMX is close here? Feature and performance curve. Ok name some features IFMX has that ORCL doesn't. Point out some benchmarks that IFMX has clobbered ORCL on. Blah, blah. I used to hate getting into this kind argument. Still do. But there are some new check boxes emerging. 8i is to the RDBMS business what Transact SQL was in 1990-1. It changes the rules. Will IFMX be able to afford to play? Gee, they couldn't afford to play on NT until it was too late. Will the R&D dollars find the right targets this time? Or is it just that there aren't enough R&D dollars to go round? So it all boils down to hoping that IFMX still has a few really bright, hardworking people who can enable it to be more nimble than the big, bad giant ORCL. Well, maybe they do, now that they have RedBrick. ;) Doubt it. Sorry for such a lengthy rant, but this is the IFMX thread. Home of the glorious rant. ttf