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

To: Sir Francis Drake who wrote (22403)	5/9/1999 8:20:00 PM
From: t2	Respond to of 74651

MSFT's European Internet Adventure (sounds like a movie title). Here is the story. dailynews.yahoo.com Sunday May 9 7:07 PM ET Internet To Be Only Lifeline For Cyber-Adventurers LONDON (Reuters) - Can man live by Internet alone? Four volunteers will find out in London Monday as they are locked away with only a credit card, a bathrobe and the Internet for company. The project organized by Microsoft Corp (Nasdaq:MSFT - news)'s msn.co.uk Web page envisages that the cyber-adventurers will be locked in separate rooms for 100 hours and will have to rely exclusively on the Internet to feed, clothe, communicate and entertain themselves, a press release said. The volunteers would also try to continue living their everyday lives, one plans to play chess while another aims to find a job. The behavior of the two male and female participants, who range in age from 30 to 67 and have differing levels of Internet experience, will be monitored by a program devised by Helen Petrie of the University of Hertfordshire. Petrie hopes the project will allow her to observe how people cope for long periods of time with only the Internet for support. Nickie Smith, product manager at msn.co.uk, said: ''We wanted to put the current Internet services to the test and see if it really is possible to survive with nothing but the Web and a credit card.'' The press release noted that in 1998 online retail in the UK was worth 406 million pounds, double the 1997 figure. An NOP Research Group poll suggests that by June 1999 9.3 million people in the UK will be online. Internet users will be able to check on the volunteers progress by visiting www.msn.co.uk. A spokesman for the project said they were hoping there would be no power cuts. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: Sir Francis Drake who wrote (22403)	5/9/1999 8:23:00 PM
From: RTev	Respond to of 74651

Great post, as usual SFD. But some observations: The value of an ISP. First, that's an expensive business. One must maintain or lease all kinds of hardware for the service: modem banks for callers, mail servers, user-space web servers. One must also lease and often pay a metered per-bit rate for the network connections between all those points of presence and the internet. As mentioned in an earlier post, the changing models of the telephone utilities may soon force the price of ISP service to near zero anyway. Does Microsoft want to get so heavily into a business that may return so little in the long run? Win2000 and MSN. MSN Intenet Access is now a consumer service. Win2000 is a business system. I doubt that Microsoft is going to want to make Win2000 too appealing to consumers. Consider, for instance, the service calls that would go something like this: "I'm trying to change the time on my taskbar clock, but it keeps telling me 'You do not have the proper privilege level to change the System Clock'. What the hell does that mean?" or "I just saved a document, but now it disappeared. ... What do you mean? ... I don't remember what user name I was logged in on when I saved it. What difference does that make?" Those are the kinds of NT/Win2000 questions that corporate IT help desks handle all the time, but they aren't issues that Microsoft's help line would want to be inundated with. On the general issue of using MSN (in some form) to help sell software. That seems to have been exactly what Microsoft planned to do when MSN was originally envisioned as a network provider similar to AOL. It was proprietary. It was expected to offer many features that would work best or work only with Microsoft software. They've moved away from that, but still use some of those notions, but do it -- not through an ISP, but through the web. Encarta, Streets, and other CD-based products have updates and other features available only to those who own the product. Office2000 has extensive ties to Microsoft web sites. I'm not sure if there are exclusive web areas for owners, but it's possible. buying into direct ownership of cable. I fear they're a bit too late for that. Comcast is a closely-held family-controlled company. The Robinson family shows no signs of wanting to sell it. Cox is in a similar situation, although there are signs the family might be willing to sell that one. TWX is public, widely held, and deeply in debt, so they might consider dumping their cable holdings for a hefty price, but I suspect it would be very hefty. Any of these options would give the buyer only super-regional presence at most. But even if they did find someone to buy, do you really think Microsoft could run it? That's so far from what they do, I suspect they'd have massive problems in trying to manage such a utility. And on a free ISP affecting Linux The market for that system right now is in the server space. There's no sign that it's anywhere close to competing for the consumer desktop. Giving away an ISP connection isn't going to matter much to a company planning to hang their Linux Apache web server onto a T1 line. (By the way -- your point #2 would work with Windows2000, but would land them in court again if they tried it with Windows 98.)

To: Sir Francis Drake who wrote (22403)	5/9/1999 10:45:00 PM
From: ed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Well, it is a good idea, and we have the same thinking. That is why I said Microsoft should gave the $5B to AOL , which will benefit Microsoft's software business worldwide ( not just in the US) .