All About Sun Microsystems Message Board

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next

To: DownSouth who wrote (5637)	11/16/1997 8:00:00 AM
From: Holger Johannsen	Read Replies (2) of 64865

DownSouth, the holy war against Wintel is a great marketing campaign! First of all Sun is always in the news for all those nice comments from Scott about Bill and thus Sun gets a higher visibility. Secondly, the war shows that Sun is really committed to UNIX as a superior OS (though I think OS/2 is a good one as well since I use it without problems). Just think of the companies that turned to NT. They are now more or less playing in the same league as Dell, Compaq or Gateway and I'm sure those companies are not prepared to play by those rules. If you wonder which companies I talk about take a look at SGI (about to sell low end NT Desktops), Digital (can't convince customers to buy their Alpha line because they were never really serious about it), HP (though they seem to gain market share). The only part of Wintel that makes money is Win and tel. IBM is IMO the only real competitor left. Sun is actually the last hardware company that is going straight against the Win part but perhaps not the tel part anymore. I'm not quite sure yet if it is a good move to join forces with Intel. After badmouthing Merced it would be a strange move to support it some weeks later. The desktop battle has been lost but I think the server war will continue as long as MS has no comparable OS available. Nevertheless I still believe in the NC for the corporate world. Java will be very helpful in an effort to promote the NC concept but I don't really count on Java as a direct source of income for Sun (never did this when I bought Sun in the first place). Even if we just see NetPCs, Sun will benefit from it because all those PCs depend on a powerful server and I still doubt Wintel will come up with such a product. I'm not afraid of Wintel since the media always compares Wintel products of tomorrow with today's products from the Unix camp. The only problem I see right now is that Sun did quite the same with NC that MS always does: announce vaporware. They did the announcement quite some time ago and gave Wintel the chance to develop a strategy against it. I still wait for the commercial start of NCs in the corporate world. Can't be that difficult to produce an NC. Finally, I believe in Scott because he is not a Steve Jobs kind of guy, flying high in intellectual spheres and developing strategies that are great from a technological standpoint of view but then don't get executed well. Like Fortune said, Scott is a manufacturing guy who knows how to run a factory and get the products out of the door. This is something you rarely find in technology companies (the only other CEO who comes to my mind is Charles Wang from CA, but he is very controversial). BTW, do you know where Sun gets the majority of parts for its machines? I wonder about it because all the PC box-makers are favorably affected by the currency devaluations in Asia and I find it hard to believe that Sun will not be affected by this. I'm also a little bit concerned about the Encore deal. I'm not familiar with the way they handled it but I think it would be a valuable expansion for their storage division (I'm quite bullish for storage thus my main holding is EMC). I read the article about the opposition from Encore shareholders but did not quite understand what it really was about. Holger

Report TOU Violation

Share This Post

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next