Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Gerald Walls who wrote (17047)	2/28/1999 2:51:00 AM
From: Andy Thomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Hi, I've had a few thoughts lately on MSFT. I'm not in touch with the company the way I used to be, but my credentials are: contractor on DOS 5 beta doing tech support contractor on win 3.1 beta doing compuserve support full-time compuserve sysop on win 3.10, dos 6, win 3.11, win 95, ie 3 I was there for the transition of beta support from cis to the newsgroups and web and left while the beginnings of ie4 were being worked out... i met some of the people they're dragging before the court today. i was interviewed by the ftc over the win3.1 incident with dr-dos i don't agree with the lawsuit... i also don't agree with the copyright laws which favor the "cathedral" over the "bazaar." there were people there who probably have several millions today who may have rarely if ever worked more than a 30 hour week. there are others there who worked very hard and have less... some far less. as an employee with options there were others aside from myself who shared my sentiment that the stock was fundamentally flawed. in hindsight some of us made bad decisions by cashing in too soon... the neo-tech people say earnings are key in stock appreciation being old fashioned in a way, i like very low p/bs, like 2:1 or less. 3:1 and i start to get nervous i think that sufficient brainpower exists outside of msft that the "brainpower as an intangible asset" argument rings false. now, for my thoughts about the company: they should re-assemble all the people who are still there from the win95/ie3/j++ teams and organize for the next round of battle... i think they should work on a black box platform and reveal the api completely. they should write vertical apps and solutions for large corporations. they may need a very small kernel, and write other, modular services themselves .. other developers could write other modules. windows is too convoluted with the dos underpinnings so they need to build something from the ground up... something fast, elegant, fairly open, and extensible they should also sell a version of linux and examine the benefits of open source i liked win95... thought it was a good compromise for the time... made my file accesses for football sports pro stat compilations much faster than plain dos... win98 was too evolutionary to be a breakthrough win 98 doesn't have the relative merits for its time that win95 did... i don't think win98 is worth 80-90 dollars. one thing which really slowed win95 down was exchange... i wonder if the outlook stuff is any faster. it's funny how a certain 486 with win 3.1 could boot in less than 3 seconds while a win98 pentium 2 takes much longer. these pentium 2s with 64 mb of ram seem to have long POSTs. 7 or 8 years ago i would have expected much better performance from a computer by now than what i see with wintel98.... i am fond of many of the people i knew at MSFT but after awhile the overall direction of the company didn't agree with me... it would be the same if sun or nscp were the leaders... i'd be over on their threads saying what a bunch of ripoffs they were... the most powerful corporations always have certain real or imagined nefarious elements... i hope that in the end i have proven to be somewhat objective... this isn't to you in particular gerald, i'v just never figured out how to make a new post so... FWIW Andy