Jay, I agree.
The key to Sun is as it always has been, hardware sales. I can't think of one application beyond the OS and their C/C++ compiler our company has ever purchased from Sun. So I say, Sun is a hardware company, like Apple is a hardware company. If this were not the case, they'd have one hell of an office suite for sale, never seen one, have you?
What's the database product? Sybase/Oracle
Spreadsheet?
Graphical Email client? (not the freebie in Openwin)
Etc, etc, etc.
Microsoft is an application and OS company, Apple by all reasonable assessments was a hardware company. Notice their historically high computer and peripheral prices, also note which applications sold best for the Mac, they were all from Microsoft. To bad Microsoft doesn't port Office to Solaris, then you'd have a great reason to get a huge server and tons of NC's running Java hooks into Office, using the defacto industry standard productivity suite.
Unfortunatly for Sun, both IBM and Microsoft seem determined to either co-opt Java as their own or try to kill it ala the last UNIX unification debacle, by fragmenting the community with different Native modes.
There is one hopeful item I read yesterday regarding Java and Sun, it had to do with the Telephoney Java API being demonstrated next week. This product has a base price of $10,000 and goes up from there. If Sun can get into the development tools side quickly and create some more standards used by the telcos, that would be a great news for Sun's Java division. These are the kind of killer industry standards where Sun can set some serious standards and product sales, as Microsoft and others seem to focus soley on the desktop.
PS: I'm doing my part for Sun sales, as I'm going to upgrade my home Sparc 2 to a Sparc 5 sometime this month. I have no doubt Java may eventually drive hardware sales, the problem is who's hardware? At the desktop level, I really don't think Sun can compete. However, at the telco, industrial level Wintel can't compete. The highest margins are at the Industrial and Engineering level, so don't attack me for stating the fact Sun is not a good desktop player. They are a great server and Industrial strength computing company. Last I looked most folks don't need one of these at home, but when they use their phones, beepers and the like they expect that technology to plain work. In this area Sun has a chance at real dominance given Java and a compete line of very powerful workstations and servers. |
