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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (12259)	11/17/1998 9:48:00 PM
From: ToySoldier	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

And the bad press keeps on rolling.... NT 5 upgrade won't be easy by Denise Romberg Windows NT systems administrators will have to brace themselves as they embark on the most anticipated operating system upgrade since the advent of the mainframe, warns the author of an Aberdeen Group report. The Boston-based research and consulting firm says in its Microsoft Windows NT 5 planning guide that upgrading to the new operating system will be complex and difficult for those implementing poorly planned installations, and will produce little in the way of major gains for at least two years. Among the administrators' tasks will be the redesign of the Active Directory architecture, an issue "that is going to be complex and difficult to implement. Because (Active Directory services are) the key to a lot of NT 5's benefits, that will delay the implementation of everything else," said Aberdeen senior vice-president Wayne Kernochan. Microsoft will issue tools to ease the process, Kernochan said, but the combined format does not address enterprise-wide user rights such as those that might be required to access a database application outside a user's own workgroup. While users will want to implement NT 5 across the enterprise, hoping that one operating system will simplify administration, Kernochan likened the process of converting all system programming to NT 5 to that of "a python swallowing a pig." "It's a big product," Kernochan said. NT 5 has 40 million lines of code, "and that means lots of new interfaces (APIs)" that in the long run will produce enhanced file and search services and a more automated installation process for applications. But intially, developers will be pressed to understand new and complex development interfaces. The desktop product, Windows NT 5 Workstation, will require user systems to provide 64 MB of main memory and the "major inconvenience and non-trivial task" of rebuilding potentially thousands of enterprise desktop file systems. "Mid- and large-sized organizations will continue to have a difficult time deploying NT beyond the workgroup and across the enterprise," the report states. However, Kernochan said he was uncertain as to how many organizations could be classified as true enterprise implementations currently using NT 4 enterprise servers. Jean Bozman, software analyst with International Data Corp. in Mountain View, Calif., suggests that while Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. says the NT operating system can scale to mid-range size, the market does not reflect this. "Microsoft studied a lot of Unix functionality in terms of remote client management, and while Unix is more scalable on an absolute level, NT needs to scale up even higher than it does today" if Microsoft hopes to capture the mid-range server market, she said. IDC places mid-range hardware prices between $100,000 (U.S.) and $1 million (U.S.), and identifies Unix RISC (reduced instruction set) machines by Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp. and Digital Equipment Corp. (now owned by Compaq) as mid-range server market leaders. Aberdeen projects the Enterprise edition will arrive about a year following the intial Server product release. It will provide "dramatic performance and scalability improvements over NT 4," but these gains will require a "large effort to achieve," as users test and prototype functions such as load-balancing or prepare for 64-bit code. While NT 5 seeks to rival the reliability of current mid-range systems, Aberdeen Group suggests that it could be two to four years before features such as the IntelliMirror – which mirrors client files on the server – are deployed, possibly leaving users looking to other suppliers to meet availability needs. While the Zero Administration for Windows (ZAW) promises ease in managability, the report points out that this will require customization through service integrators, and new tools that leverage IntelliMirror capabilities will take time to materialize. "While you can give Microsoft credit for tackling a tough problem and coming up with a solution to it, if I'm an admininstrator, I'm bracing myself," Kernochan said. He suggested that organizations already beta testing NT 5 (a third beta is scheduled for early 1999) will have an easier time with its implementation. Concerns over the actual release date for the final product are "minor compared to the amount of time it will take before all the pieces that users will want in NT5 will be in place," Kernochan said. He added that despite the number of applications moving to NT 5, he did not anticipate that major applications such as databases will be in a position to take advantage of the new features of NT 5 for at least six months to a year. IDC's Bozman said that NT 5 is an important step for Microsoft as it moves into the enterprise space. She pointed out that the plan appears to be one that will occur in stages: first, improve scalability and performance; then follow with clustering improvements to ensure that critical applications run continuously on enterprise network servers. "Until all those things happen, Unix is still going to have a very strong play in the mid-range, because NT is not operating at that level of scalability or even on the reliability side," she said. Toy

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (12259)	11/18/1998 12:19:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Cheryl - Judges don't, as a rule, issue injuctions in cases unless they believe the requesting party will prevail in trial. Not quite right - the Judge has an obligation to grant the injunction if he believes there is a reasonable chance the requesting party will prevail - that's a much lower standard. The requesting party usually also has to show 'irreparable harm' if the injunction is not granted and they later prevail. There is no assumption of outcome from granting an injunction - it is one step up from accepting that there is enough evidence to bring suit in the first place.