>The desktop battle has been lost but I think the server war will continue as long as MS has no comparable OS available.
The conclusion among corporate/government decision makers is not so clear as you seem to think. Many have already decided that NT is a "comparable" OS. Techies aside, they may be right, because what is driving their decisions is perceptions about the direction of technology and what applications run on what platforms. UNIX used to have distinct advantages, as far as availability of applications which ran only on UNIX. Over that last 18 months we have seen almost all (if not all) of the most important mission critical applications now available on NT. In fact, many developers who were exclusively UNIX now are developing for NT first, then UNIX second. They too perceive that the biggest bang for their development buck is NT.
One more thing: the innovators are rushing in to fill the holes in NT. For example, there is a cadre of "manufacturers" offering multiprotocol filer servers which ease the transition or coexistence between UNIX and NT and overcome the poor file server performance of NT.
>Nevertheless I still believe in the NC for the corporate world.
I agree.
>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.
Similar to the NC, server functionality is also "disassembling", so the argument that more powerful servers will win the battle seems weak to me. By "disassembling" I mean that the functions of a powerful server are falling out of the general purpose OS and becoming "appliances". For example, Cisco took routing off of Unix. Network Appliance has taken filer services off of Unix. Web caching (proxy servers) are becoming appliances. In fact, the NC is an "appliance".
>Can't be that difficult to produce an NC.
It isn't difficult, but there are three problems:
1) cost of producing full-blown PCs is falling dramatically. Remember when one of the attractions to an NC was that it would be <$1000?
2) there is no significant demand
3) the infrastructure to support all of the functions that the NC does not do is not in place
>Scott is a manufacturing guy who knows how to run a factory and get the products out of the door.
No disrespect intended, but those skills are good when you are the gorilla in the market, but they will do you no good if your marketshare begins to seriously erode. Example, Dr. An Wang. A great engineer, but his market fell out from under him and he had no idea how to respond except to build a better engineered PC that would only run Wang software. He could have been a combination of Sun, Compaq, Lotus, WordPerfect literally overnight, but even though is marketing people told him that, he refused to play in the open systems market.
>BTW, do you know where Sun gets the majority of parts for its machines?
No, but that is an excellent question. I hope someone can help us with that.
Well, I feel kinda bad being the devil's advocate here in the group. I am still long on SUNW, but holy wars create and are created by irrational zealousy, and I sense that in the UNIX camp, just like I saw in in the mainframe camp when UNIX sprang up; just like I sense it in the Novel camp in the fight against NT. Folks at Sun need to focus on meeting the needs of the market the way the market perceives its needs, rather than fighting the market forces. "Don't fight the forces--use them." |
