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

To: Claude who wrote (16413)	2/18/1999 7:04:00 PM
From: t2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Watched CNN interview a Harvard expert on what the outcome in the remedy phase would be: Gave 3 options: 1. Sin no more 2. Cause a structural change in the company 3. Break up He concluded that both 1 and 3 are not expected. Only 2 seems reasonable. A restructuring? So what? Nothing happens as far as revenues are concerned.

To: Claude who wrote (16413)	2/20/1999 3:57:00 PM
From: axp	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

RE: Where I think the battle is shaping up is in future net enabled devices. MSFT is nowhere near guaranteed this market and it will be huge Good post. MSFT was at the right place at the right time and had enough leadership smarts to ride the software PC wave. It's an oversimplification, but this is not unlike other companies like IBM (mainframes) and Digital (minicomputers). The problem is that once you're on the wave you're committed to supporting the customers who brought you there. While Digital got hung up with VMS when the PC market overwhelmed the minicomputer field (though it's not gone yet), it's amazing how IBM managed to make it through this crisis (barely) and come out in good shape. The big question for me is whether MSFT can successfully move their customers to the NEXT BIG THING. Windows is suffering with a huge burden of backward compatibility. In addition, its history of having grown from a small OS into a big one has resulted in incoherent architecture, dll hell and API rot. Windows NT is a great kernel OS, but is being crippled by an attempt to do everything for everybody. Windows 2000 might end up not doing anything terrifically well. Loading the increasingly top-heavy and buggy win32 subsystem from Win 95/98 on NT masks most of the advantage of having the NT kernel there, even if the kernel was totally bug free. The way out is to come up with a totally new architecture like net enabled devices where one doesn't even expect the old apps to run on them. Couple this with some new, more controlled and reliable hardware configurations (instead of the plug-in anything PC) and you have something that could reasonable be expected to penetrate the market like TVs. Will MSFT be able to pull this off? Will the need to support the windows installed base be too big a drag? Will in-fighting between competing divisions (ala Windows NT / Windows CE)sink an attempt to create yet another OS?. I don't think MSFT is even close to being a clear winner here. Lots of money doesn't confer that much advantage if you don't have the product to push. A company coming in with something new has a big advantage by not having to support an installed base. A company like SUN without a mass consumer level product could have this advantage too. But this is all a long ways off. There's years of fat profits ahead, or so MSFT hopes.