Here comes the devil's advocate...
IBM was a one stop shop in the 80's as well. It obviously takes more than being a one stop shop. With the commodization of hardware, it will be worth shopping around. Then there are those companies that will specialize in putting together a package for you, they are the real solutions company, Sun is still just a hardware company with some software extensions (albeit they have a lot of momentum, yet no profit from Java).
Assume you just brought your own ISP or e-commerce company public. Everything is riding on your QOS. It HAS to be 7x24 with high availability and redundancy to the extent of
less than 1 hour downtime per year. And it MUST be a secure
operating system. You have to be able to take 1 million+
hits per day and you need high TPC/C benchmarks with reliable database servers. You need the ability to expand the servers and their capabilities with your expected business growth.
Assuming such, and Sun offers the solution for 1 million dollars, while Dell offers the solution on the same hardware platform (Merced) with a choice of two OSs (Win 2000 or Linux), at about $400,000, with proven storage capabilities coming from IBM, which would you choose. Let's assume you just won two million in funding, Dell allows you to lease the equipment at $9000 per month, and the specs have the Dell solution giving you the best bang for the busk as well as a 50% lower aggregate price. Then assume that if you go with the Win 2000 package, you get the entire slew of applications along with the hardware/OS (DB, application server, marketing support, terminal server support for Office 2000 and back office application ASPs, etc.). Then assume that computing power prices are dropping so fast that you are weary of committing 25-50% of your funding to just the hardware to run the op, and Dell can offer you the latest and greatest for less than Sun's actual cost. Then assume that you chose Sun and had 1 hour of down time for the year, and your competitor chose Dell, and had a full day of downtime for the year, but took the 1 million dollars or so in money that he saved and used it for a marketing blitz that took away 30% of your potential customers, of which he lost 8% due to the service droppage. Meanwhile, since you put your money into the
Sun brand instead of marketing and other operations, you were not able to encroach upon any of his prospective market. Net result, you gain 8% market share, he gains 22%. Just a day in the real world of entrepunrial business, which is why NT is gaining share so quickly, it offers a lot of bang for the buck backed by a company that is known to deliver. The same goes for Dell.
You don't need a fast chip with awesome cacheing capabilities,
you don't need a whizzy gui with talking paper clips, you need
a SOLUTION. That means you have 2 choices: SUNW or IBM.
Do you really believe that?? So you don't think Dell, Intel or MSFT will take prospective market share from Sun? Didn't you think that 4 years ago when Wintel aimed there sites at the workstation market? Look at where Dell, INTC and MSFT are now, and who do you think they took the workstation market share from? Remember, they started from zero. |
