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Technology Stocks : CheckFree Holdings Corp. (CKFR), the next Dell, Intel? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: g_m10 who wrote (797)	12/20/1998 3:18:00 PM
From: Paul Franceus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20297

<< I was thinking that the OFX will only be used when information needs to be presented to humans, that is on the presentment side of EBPP. CF's main business is transaction>> I don't think that's the case. The OFX is about 500 pages (I just downloaded it from ofx.net), and I haven't had a chance to study it completely yet, but I believe that the messages will be used both by your user software (like quicken, or a java applet in your browser) and also as the message format for banks interfacing with banks, etc. There is much more to the spec than just a message format. It includes transaction standards, server and client interfaces, and more. So it will actually be more in the back end. What will be presented to users is more likely to be HTML, since that's what browsers speak, unless you are using something like Quicken which can present the data to you any way that they choose. My guess is that the "OFX 2.0" spec from Micro$oft probably follows their usual method of making something proprietary that is "close" to a standard, but not compatible with real standards. I'd bet that they put something in there that is only easy to do with Windows NT or some such. Another attempt to grab proprietary control of what was supposed to be an open market. Hope it backfires in their face, big time. OFX is a problem for Checkfree in the sense that a bank that has an OFX server running can accept messages from anyone that is speaking OFX. This is also an opportunity for them, since they will be able to transact with anyone that has a server. I bet that good old Billy doesn't like that idea one bit, and so he's building his own proprietary spec, and the implementation by M$ will be just slightly incompatible with everyone else's. Paul