I especially want to hear from qwik, who had extremely HIGH hopes for staroffice, especially the "mac" version.
twister, I claim not to be an all-weather cheerleader with blinders on. If you remember, I defend some things that Sun does and complain about others.
1. StarOffice. It's possible that StarOffice could still have some impact, but I doubt it. I now think it's something they bought in haste and then underfunded at leisure. The point is, it began as, and as far as I know, still is, a buggy garage-shop dog that never worked. Now it's being maintained as an open source product? The kiss of death. Has anybody tried Netscape 6? It's no longer a beta. I tried it for about 20 minutes before uninstalling it and consigning the CD to the trash.
As to the ASP version, Desktop.com went belly up along with a fistfull of its VC-funded competitors, we haven't heard from our world-changing friend Reggie Middleton for a while, and I no longer believe that ASP versions of office suites will ever be of any importance. For Sun, bad idea combined with indifferent execution = coaster.
2. US 3. Sonki dismisses the importance of US3 with one sentence: of no importance. Why this is so, she doesn't bother to enlighten us. I respectfully disagree with Sonki, I think this looks uncomfortably like a tortoise-and-hare story with Sun playing the role of the hare, taking a nap while the tortoise keeps coming out with faster and faster machines and more and more press releases. It bothers me that HWP and IBM still say every quarter, we missed our overall number but our servers did great. Sun should have hurt them worse by now, exploding server market or no. If a press release ever comes out showing the an Itanic-based server beating a US2-based Sun server because the corresponding US3-based Sun server isn't out yet, it's game over. Seems impossible? Two years ago, when the US3 was "almost ready" and the Itanic was obviously a three-year disaster, this was totally unthinkable. Today it's a 50-50 possibility (because I still think the Itanic may never work at all). For Sonki it's not an issue, for me it's THE issue. I don't know where people are getting this "demand outstripping supply" stuff---it's total BS, except in the sense that the supply is effectively zero.
3. The good news: Sun has always been a high-beta stock. It fluctuates in both directions more violently than the market. To a large extent it's down as far as it is because the market is down as far as it is. In addition, its bubble-premium has been partly excised, probably never to fully return. As usual, this whole discussion would be a lot more interesting if it were happening in an upward-trending market, but it isn't. When the market goes back up, which it will, Sun will go back up, and we will be back to the unanswerable question of what kind of multiple SUNW "deserves", a question on which reasonable and unreasonable people alike can and do differ.
I was wrong about StarOffice (but I don't owe you any f*ckin' beer)<g>. I stand by my assertion that the most important aspects of Sun's return to leadership (stockwise) are in its own hands, particularly wrt the US3.
--QS |
