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

To: denni who wrote (15374)	2/2/1999 2:49:00 AM
From: BenYeung	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

I guess you are one of the cool ones. :) About MS products, SQL Server 7, Internet Information Server (IIS), Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and the Visual Studio suite are some of the products that I am the most familiar with. SQL Server is the database server that runs on NT. I don't mind saying that Oracle's product is more versatile but SQL Server is definitely much cheaper for most smaller businesses. No doubt, Oracle is SQL Server's biggest competitor (SAP and IBM just cannot compete with the volume and pricing of these two). Visual Studio composed of few different product: Visual Interdev, Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual Foxpro and Visual Sourcesafe. For 800 bucks (or less) you have a full suite of product development tools for every sort of application you want to develop on Windows. Currently, no other companies have comparable offerings and MS names top ranking in this category. IIS is a Web Server and MTS is a middleware server that manages software components and transactions (I don't know how to explain this in non-programmer terms). If any of you didn't know, IIS and MTS are free to download (they used to cost $) because MS wants the piece of Internet pie. IIS is fighting hard to gain market share from Apache Web Server (also free) but an Apache/Unix combo are much stabler than IIS/NT combo. However, IIS runs a scripting engine called ASP (Active Server Pages) that has gain massive popularity because it employs a easy to code language call Visual Basic Script. There have been ASP ports to different hardware/OS types due to its popularity. The preview of IIS 5 (a future release) will have dramatic improvements to the way Internet client/server is done so that this product may enforce MS's stance in the Internet market. In my very humble opinion, Microsoft's largest treat is not from Oracle, Netscape or Sun, but from another OS named Linux (co-developed all around the world by volunteer programmers, and its source code is free). And guess what, Oracle, Netscape and Sun all knows this and are jumping into developing applications for Linux. MS is very aware of Linux and apparently MS cannot sell NT for free or distribute source code of NT like Linux can. Linux lacks one thing that NT has -- applications. I am speculating that in one year, Linux will full-on product selection in the database / office applications and development tools by the most well known companies. Currently, alot of Linux's products are freeware written by computer geeks. Once the commerical market is formed for Linux, NT has to watch out. Just my opinion and it doesn't reflect the stance and opinion of Microsoft Corporation. Ben Yeung