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

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (22752)	5/16/1999 2:33:00 PM
From: Sir Francis Drake	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Again - doesn't matter. The same with SUNW. The point is that SGI (and others in the same game), will expend resources to promote alternatives to NT. Having said that, NT's saving grace, is application ware. That has been the MSFT way to leveraging and growing it's dominance of the desktop. The question is whether the advantage that NT presently has in that regard is large enough to allow for the same maneuver that Win 9x pulls off. NT has the initial advantage. But apps are being written by major developers as we speak, and momentum appears to be gathering. The race is between NT's lead, and the "other guys" momentum. That is why I'm desperately interested in the fate of Win 2000 in all it's flavors. On the one hand, I wish Win 2K would come out ASAP, because MSFT still has the IT mindshare of the majority of the market, and the sooner Win 2K takes advantage of that the better. The transition may be a bit tricky, but I imagine MSFT will pull out all the stops. OTOH, I can fully understand why MSFT has taken so long - they want to come out with something that is robust enough that even if alternatives have a slight edge, it won't seem worth the hassle given the fact that you are working with a great pool of appl ware (and that's why MSFT rightly worries about legacy questions, and spend considerable resources to "drag" stuff along as far as it can). In the end, I'm optimistic. If Win 2K lives up to its billing from the performance point of view, the advantages of uniformity, incumbency and MSFT marketing should carry the day.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (22752)	5/16/1999 4:48:00 PM
From: John F. Dowd	Respond to of 74651

Michelle: Everything is distribution. In a distributed environment what is the use of having data flying around that is not meaningfully useable to the edge of the net. Fed Ex is a good example. They built up their local distribution before they started buying a huge fleet of airplanes. Once the application market is in hand the O/S is established. AAPL would have died at one point until VisiCalc came along and rescued it. It takes years to build a great end user application and MSFT has just too many good ones to walk away from. They have become the defacto applications not to mention the tens of thousands of 3rd party apps. available that are available for Windows. I recently switched from a MAc to the Windows environment and the Windows O/S is far more stable than the Mac 8.5 platform and of course I now have a much greater choice of third party apps. available to me. Should be interesting to see how Rubin's remarks effect this mercurial market. By the way say hello to Billy Blanks. JFD