Amy,<<<Once Intel has all the product tools, I believe this will be a marketing battle, and unfortunately, Sun is very good at marketing. Let's keep our fingers crossed.>>>
Is our "Amy a Bull" wavering?
This is not anything we have to worry much about. Sun has been in the server arena from the beginning and Intel has not really entered the high end server market.
The Xeon competes in the low end and has virtually 85% of the under $25k market. When did Xeon come into the market - about two years ago?
Merced and McKinley are designed to compete in the enterprise market. Tony Viola is the resident expert in this area. He has spent virtually his whole adult life in this field and he knows it cold.
IMO, Sun is an interim solution until Merced and McKinley takes off. Sun is currently more robust and there is an army of programmers who are very comfortable with the arcane unix operating system. There are a lot of commands that the original MS DOS operating system must have copied - with a lot of backslash, backslash, make directory, remove directory types of syntax (A lot of Unix programmers will be laughing at my comments - but who cares).
As far as hardware is concerned, this battle is over before it has started. The cost performance ratio is too compelling in IA64 favor.
What we need to watch is Linux development and adoption rate.
Linux is free and it is an open source OS. The philosophy behind this is that anybody can help to debug problems and anybody can contribute code. More programmers will be contributing to Linux development than MSFT or Sun could ever employ to develop their proprietary OS.
Also, even if Linux were not free, people would prefer an open source OS than to use someone's proprietary and secret source code. Imagine all those programmers in Bangalore digging into Linux source even as we speak.
The server market is done. Craig Barrett is (IMO)looking beyond to make every server a client and every client a server and provide the products and services to connect all the servers to all the appliances that some are envisioning.
If I sound a little shrill, it is because these fellas in white coats are trying to put me into....
Regards,
Mary |
