H. Wai:
You state:
> Can IBM provide an end to end solution in the Java market?
Oh of course they can, and will do so, and so will Sun, HP, DEC, SGI, and a whole bunch of other small to startup companies. In the case of IBM, they are working in parallel with with Sun and not just from the stand point of competing but rather cooporating. For example IBM has a distributed component technology called CORBA, and Sun's version of the same thing is RMI. Early last year they were in fact competing however within the past 6 months they in fact have been cooporating with each other to integrate and to push for both technologies to the market (among their partners). IBM, like Sun, has been working on NCs for the past 18 months or so. They also have the servers to back them up, and also the software based on Java (e.g. tools such as Visual Age, or their raw technology such as CORBA). So certainly they are in an excellent position to enjoy their share of the network computing market accordingly and as defined by Sun.
You state:
> Network computing is in the technology realm while network
> society you refer to is in the business realm... .So what do think
> about IBM, HP and Sun? Are they mainly cooperating or
> competing?
Perhaps I may not have been too clear in my previous post. In my humble opinion network computing has given the birth to the network society in the same manner that the invention of electricity has resulted in the world evolving into what is today! Taking the electricity analogy, because of the entity we call electricity the world has emerged as it is today. It has given birth to many new industries working together on one common ground: the use of electricity, without which their products can not possibly exist! In a way these industries are cooporating with one another to follow on a set of same standards (e.g. 110 Volts in the US, and 220 Volts everywhere else). At the same time they are competing with each other in their product offerings (e.g. Sony offers its version of 27 inch TV, and so does RCA. But they both follow the same code of standards as far as the electricity power and the analog frequency of receiving stelite outputs are concerned, etc.). Similarly in a new computing model (i.e. the raw set of technologies such as Java, NCs, RMI, CORBA, etc.) companies will cooporate with each other (non-vertical growth), while in the specifics of their offerings to the market they will be competing with one another. And if a company like Microsoft attempts to push its own products based on non-standards they will lose greatly (e.g. it would be similar to Sony selling its TVs in the US basedon the 220V electricity and then requiring consumers to buy adaptors to convert the 110V to 220 voltage)!
In the case of Sun, IBM and HP, they are cooporating with each other on the acceptance of Sun's computing technology (similar to how Sony and RCA cooporate on the 100V, and analog frequency, etc.), and they will be competing with each other on their offerings of products using that technology (e.g. Sony's version of 27'' TV versus RCA's)! However because of the new order and the way society has transformed itself to a network society the demand for the specific network products will be so huge everyone involved will profit greatly (e.g. Sony, and RCA both make TVs and both draw a huge profit from selling those TVs).
Regards,
Addi Jamshidi |
