EDIT: Maybe the X-box toy initiative is brilliant! Catch 'em while they're young & want to play games, but make 'em play the games over the web using MSN and Windows CE! It's
sort of like giving bubble gum cigarettes away outside school yards. And when your character gets killed, instead of just dying and getting a "game over" screen, you get a blue screen with a cryptic message about invalid memory access plus a few hundred hex digits, and customer service is $35 per minute-on-hold! You have to hand it to these guys: they're master marketers<g>!
This comes full circle. SUNW first came on my radar screen in 1994 or 95 with Scott McNealy pounding a sound bite from the other room about Microsoft being a purveyor of "toys" (in the context of network computing), and saying that in the same breath as "SUNW shareholder value".
I'm at a place now in reading 'High Noon' (The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the rise of Sun Microsystems) where the point is being made through the quotes of others as to it having been a mistake for McNealy to hold Sun Microsystems so above and apart from Microsoft's Windows, and to have seemed so shrill and solitary against the broader interest of their customers. Or so the retrospection goes.
But, what if 5 years after that McNealy quote, it comes to pass that Microsoft is all the things that Scott McNealy warned it was? What if the network *is the computer and the computer is optimized for a mature unix operating system itself designed for networks? What if there is no "better Unix than Unix" as Guitar Hero Bill Gates promised all of corporate America? What if NT5 was years late, or never came at all as promised with Merced? What if Java reached critical mindshare mass? What if the computing paradigm suddenly leaped off of the desktop frying pan and into the fire of scalable, mission critical servers and ubiquitous thin devices?
What if the network obviated the personal computer operating system in the 'local user context'? What if at the same time, compatible FREE, robust *nix network standard multipurpose PC operating system alternatives, complete with free tools, free secure external browsers, free office suites with source code, Win32 interoperability, and an arguably better solitaire game jumped onto legacy workstations and suddenly sub $500 PCs? What if all of this unfolded as a U.S. federal judge was about to make a preliminary remedy against the leveraging Microsoft monopoly, perhaps requiring it to simply open up it's Application Program Interface as is the custom on the rest of the playing field?
What if Microsoft started branding X-Box toys and connected sewing machines to a big BBS and a 'Sierra Online' like "M$" branded 'tribute to the C:\ drive' portal, looking nervously toward the phone jack and wondering how to morph a monopoly hairball pyramid of irrelevant chokepoints and restrictive vendor contracts into direct consumer billing for services and monthly charges like AOL and AT&T and every other level field, open standard ISP?
With nearly 500 billion dollars of market capitalization, they're going to have to sell a lot of toys.
-JCJ
|
