Peter:
I strongly agree with your statement:
> Sun has a strong belief in level playing fields. Therefore Javasoft,
> a seperate OPCO, treats SunSoft, Borland, Symantec etc equally.
> ... Look at what MS have done in the past to Ashton Tate, Borland,
> 3Com, Lotus, Netscape & others.
True, but this is all to win in business at all cost! Microsoft as the software development tools provider has a strong position in the market among developers. It reached this level by perhaps unfair business tactics. But thats business, I am sure MSFT share holders (like anyother share holder) care only about how profitable the company is, rather than how charitable and/or nice it can be.
As for Sun, I believe the only reason Sun seems to be more honest than Microsoft when it comes to level playing fields is not because of its goodness of heart, but rather a very smart business strategy. It will be much difficult for Sun to fight Microsoft alone, and instead it tries to be friendly to everyone and have them on its side (namely IBM, Borland, Symantec, etc.) to push its raw technology (namely Java). As I once said it is similar to World War II and how US beat the Nazi Germany (not alone but rather with the help of England, France, and even Russia)!
As for SunSoft's development tools, Java Workshop 2.0 for example is nice, but that is as far as it goes!. It lacks the very basics of being a real Java Development environment. For example it does not have the intelligence to figure out the dependencies (and this I believe should be the very first thing a JDE must have). And when you compare it to for example to Borland's Jbuilder, IBM's VisualAge, or Symantec's VCPRO, you notice the ease of use and functionality is drastically missing from SunSoft's java Workshop. Then you compare Microsoft's Visual J++ to Borland's JBuilder, and Cafe, and you notice that Visual J++ truly has a nicer development and debugging environment (as far as usability is concerned). However J++ is of course Microsoft's version of Java and therefore it is no use to anyone at this time (despite all the nonesense hype and advertising that says otherwise!). But I have come to believe that Microsoft will soon (sooner than everyoine expects) will start dancing to Sun's wishes again and its development tool products will end up being the best in the desktop market to use for development of pure Java (i.e. Sun's Java) applications.
As for buying Sun in the high 40's, I believe 6-8 months from now SUNW at even its current all time high of $53 will look like a dirt cheap bargain!
Regards,
Addi Jamshidi |
