JDN, it is the future that counts now, not the past. Have you thought through the threat, to Sun, that Jacques and I are talking about? I mean, even Sun's flagship operating system, Solaris, is going to be brought up on Merced, McKinley and beyond. If those chips meet schedule and perform, why would server customers pay much more for Sun hardware to run Solaris, when they can buy the hardware most of the rest of the world is running on? There are economies of scale to take advantage of with Intel, all the way from chip manufacturing by Intel, best in the world, to even system administration, where there will be far more people that will know how to configure, network and fix Intel based servers than there will be for Sun. Sun will be the odd man out, like Apple (I know, their stock is way up there, but they get the short end of the stick on all software compatibility priority calls). The above argument is just for Solaris, or other Unix variants. Take Linux, why pay more to buy a Sun to run it, when its whole intention was to be a Unix on a cheaper platform, the PC? Then, there are NT based systems, which Sun doesn't even have a shot at.
Every time I think of buying Sun stock, I get stopped dead in my tracks by thoughts like the above. Still, there are obviously a lot of stock pickers that disagree with me.
Tony |
