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

To: taxman who wrote (20725)	4/19/1999 12:02:00 AM
From: ed	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

With PDA + wireless technology , we do not need Notebooks anymore. Because the PDA can work as a smart remote terminal communicate with your PCs at home or at the office remotely. For Microsoft to win the CE war, the followings need to be done: 1) The CE need to be simple, less power consumption for battery powered PDA, and communicable with WINDOW OS in the regular PCs. Because , lot of folks buying PDA is for convenience , and they will use their PDAs to communicate remotely, wirelessly with their PCs at home. So, CE needs to communicate with window OS. PDA just like a portable wireless terminal, you can bring it anywhere with you , and you can also use it to communicate with your PC remotely and wirelessly at home. So, a PDA is also work like a communication tool. The notebook is a fully equipped PCs , and you bring the full PCs with you when you travel, it is inconvenient. What you really need is just the terminal , so that you can use this terminal to access your PCs remotely when you are on the road, so it is more convenient and flexable. You really do not need to bring your PC with you when you travel, as long as you can access your PC remotely on the road. So, the concept of PC is completely changed.

To: taxman who wrote (20725)	4/19/1999 3:00:00 AM
From: JP Sullivan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

"how about shrinking the notebooks?" Well, sure if you can get it down to the size of a PDA, in which case you'd have to lose some features that are limited by their size (CD-ROM drives come to mind, big screen for movies & games, speakers). Power consumption is also a big concern. I think Palm's standby/use time for two AA (or is it AAA) batteries is several weeks, which is pretty hard for the current crop of PCs to beat. In any case, there is clearly a convergence of sorts going on. There is no doubt that the technology of miniaturization is going to make large capacity drives available to PDAs in the future (if I remember correctly IBM already has a 400 MB drive the size of a matchbox, which it unveiled last year). The trickier part is solving the power issues. I don't have much information about battery technology, but gauging by the longer and longer standby/talk time in cellular phones, I have to believe that there is some progress there. MSFT, to its credit, has spotted the convergence trend fairly early in the game and is working to point people in the direction of CE. Unlike the PC era, however, MSFT has a lot more competition these days (this time from US and non-US based companies), so it's going to be very interesting to see what happens. But even if CE doesn't become a huge standard like Windows on the PC, there should be enough work out there for the market to remain attractive to MSFT. What is more important about CE, however, is that it isn't only limited to PDAs. It's supposed to go into anything that has an electronic brain large enough for it (from toasters to cars, I reckon). That, IMO, is a much larger market than PDAs. Sorry for digressing. You can tell I like this topic :) Winston