Cheryl -
For once I agree whole-heartedly with your post. Having just spent the last three days at the various Win2K launch activities, I can say that my impression is that MSFT still does not "get it", and I stand by my earlier posts about where the real battle will be and why SUNW has little to fear from MSFT in the enterprise space.
MSFT is under pressure in the ASP space from the combination of DELL and Intel, who threaten to enable Linux as an alternative OS... I think the little dance that Michael DELL did in the days before the Win2K launch, and the resulting premier position that MSFT gave to DELL at the Win2K launch - DELL was featured to the virtual exclusion of other vendors - shows just how vulnerable MSFT is to that kind of threat, and how little they care about real enterprise business if their volume business is under attack.
Surely no one would take DELL seriously as an enterprise vendor - they have no services, no technology capability and no presence in the enterprise market aside from the low end departmental stuff. For MSFT to put DELL forward as their enterprise horse is a clear indication that Ballmer is blowing smoke and that MSFT is still not serious about solving the tough problems in the enterprise.
IBM and HP are credible enterprise vendors - but neither would advance NT over their own Unix products, or in IBM's case, over their proprietary high end products.
CPQ could have been a credible enterprise horse for MSFT, but instead MSFT starved CPQ's Alpha NT product to the point where CPQ abandoned it, and now is enabling DELL in CPQ's volume markets, probably at Intel's behest... despite the fact that only CPQ has the engineering capability to actually drive NT into mission critical applications, as shown by their 70% share in the exchange business and their delivery of those world-record benchmarks - which incidentally were presented by Gates as a MSFT engineering feat even though everyone knows CPQ delivered the results. Gates did not even mention CPQ in discussing the results... amazing. It looks to me like MSFT was giving CPQ just enough encouragement to keep CPQ "in the tent" but with no intent to actually take any risks with CPQ to move into the enterprise. There was an announcement in September of 1998 between CPQ and MSFT about a number of initiatives to move CPQ's high end technology into NT, but that never led to anything as far as I can tell - I have not seen a single word about it since that time, and the executives who were driving it - John Rose at CPQ and Paul Maritz at MSFT - are either "semi-retired" in the case of Maritz or gone in the case of Rose.
So I think SUNW continues to drive architectural dominance through initiatives like iPlanet and EJB, continues to drive the performance envelope with next generation products, and MSFT continues to make noise while driving their real agenda which is preservation of their volume market, a market which as you point out is not important to SUNW. |
