Bill,
SUNW's new Darwin systems are the closest thing they have to
PC's in price. They are faster in cpu processing speed than
the Pentium 266mhz by 30% and faster in the I/O slots by a
factor of 2. The Ultra 5 is selling for $2995.00, which is
competitive with the Pentium 300mhz motherboard in price/
performance. If PC resellers decide to have a price war
with the new high-end PC's, SUNW will have to remain competitive
price-wise to compete. I believe that they will.
I'm not an expert in floating point, but I have been told that
SUNW's graphics are superior and meet the requirements of
the most demanding engineering applications.
It didn't used to be this way, but now, you pretty much get
what you pay for in hardware costs. As the industry consolidates,
you'll see fewer and fewer manufacturers with very similar costs.
SUNW's hardware is generally of higher quality and superior
performance than PC's and it costs more. But, many end-users don't need that much horsepower for what they do, so PC's are ok, because they are a cheap alternative. Now that Intel is making higher spec
microprocessors, it is forcing SUNW to come up with more cost-
effective solutions to maintain their user base. It's a healthy
trend for the industry as a whole.
The real difference is not the hardware, but the software. Solaris
is light-years ahead of NT as an operating system. That has been
proven time and time again. That doesn't mean that NT won't work
at all for anybody at anytime. It means that Solaris is just better
at doing the things operating systems have to do. That is why SUNW
is on so many high-end web-servers and is considered a real player
in the enterprise market.
MSFT is not yet at the point where its software engineering can
be taken seriously. They still have a long way to go. We will see
what they come up with in the next 3-4 years, but by that time,
SUNW will be entrenched in the enterprise pretty well.
cheers,
cherylw |
