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 : Applix is back in action -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don S.Boller who wrote (2571)	3/2/1999 4:07:00 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3014

An interesting post on Yahoo. By: nojman Date: Mar 2 1999 1:33PM EST I am a first-time writer to this msg board. I am the chief strategist and technologist for a quantitative, NYC-based hedge fund, and am responsible for all of our company's decisions regarding technologies/platforms. We are on a Linux platform from VA Research, and ALL of our trading systems are implemented in Applix. Because I have implemented mission critical state-of-the-art trading systems for a fund which manages a significant amount of money, I have a pretty good perspective on the power & stability of the linux/applix platform. I am quite confident in claiming that this is in stark contrast to most of the people who have posted on this site who purport to have substantial experience with this product. Let me dispell some of the idiotic notions that I have seen propagated on this board: 1) Applixware functionality is inferior to MS Office's. - This claim reflects an enormous amount of ignorance. Unlike Excel/Office, Applix provides a multithreaded environment, giving advanced users tremendous flexibility in designing advanced applications. Unlike Excel's visual basic, Applixware's macro language, ELF, is consistent accross applications, making it much easier to integrate features from the various office components into a coherent application. IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE to implement our systems in Office/Excel without writing A LOT OF CODE in C++ to do the things that office can't do; we chose instead to implement them purely in Applix and the entire development of our systems took just weeks. 2) Applix is unstable. - Again, pure idiocy. In nine months of existence, our Linux/Applix platform has NOT HAD EVEN ONE SOFTWARE CRASH! If anybody knows of an NT/Office based trading operation that does not reboot their systems at least once a week, please let me know... The reason I have not posted on this board before is beacuse the above info constitutes part of the competitive advantage of my firm. Now that linux is in the spotlight, applix is sure to follow, and my disincentive to disseminate this info is mitigated to an extent. Mostly, though, my threshold for stupidity has finally been breached after perusing this message board recently. I am not advocating the purchase of APLX shares. I think the management sucks, and has not positioned the company to benefit adequately from the inevitable rise of linux. The management is also partially responsible for the huge amount of disinformation which is and has been propagated about their product. From a functionality point of view however, Applix is orders of magnitude superior to anything else out there on any platform. MS Office is a distant second, and Star Office is not even on the map... reposted by Tom Watson tosiwme