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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates

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To: LindyBill who wrote (7013)	9/25/1999 9:34:00 AM
From: James Sinclair	Read Replies (3) of 54805

I would love to find a new Gorilla in the Mist, Jim, but I think Linux and Java will always be chimps. Linux and Java will never even be chimps from a gorilla game perspective. The Linux source code is in public distribution, so if it really does take off you can bet there will be more companies besides Red Hat trying to make money off it. Java is just a programming language and it certainly doesn't seem to be helping Sun become a Gorilla. Actually what I'm looking at is a scenario of incremental steps that could break Microsoft's gorilla status. Think about this for a minute: 1. Large company seeks to lower their total ownership costs for their IT assets. They set up a Citrix server farm and manage their software from there. Everyone's still running Windows on the clients. 2. Company decides that since Citrix supports Linux, they can replace some or all of their Windows machines outside the server farm with Linux boxes. People using these machines see very little difference because within the ICA client they're still running Windows. Microsoft still making money on the servers and the Office licenses required to support the Linux clients. Company saves money on the client OS licenses. 3. We know not that Citrix is at least talking to, if not working with Sun. All that's missing is for someone to develop a really good replacement for Office that runs on the Sun platform and the company could change the servers in the Citrix server farm. What would drive them to want to do that? Maybe a more reasonable licensing policy that doesn't require the company to pay for an Office license for each client supported by the server farm. Maybe reliability or security concerns, since these are areas that are still not exactly Windows' strengths. As you may have figured out, the interesting player in this scenario is Citrix. I don't know if that would make them the new gorilla, but it will be interesting to see where the relationship with Sun is heading. Remember that one of the things that makes a gorilla is the cost of converting over to anything else. This scenario breaks that cost down into smaller, manageable steps. Step 1 is already taking place in a lot of companies. Step 2 is not unreasonable at all in the near future. Step 3, I don't have a clue.

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