Well, my opinion, FWIW, is that Sun is handing out free cigarettes to seventh-graders, hoping against hope that they'll be doing four packs a day by the time they graduate from college and get a real job.
This worked before... eight years ago you couldn't walk into a college, government agency or software development house without seeing a Sun workstation or two. Part of this was because the entry cost was so low; Sun would let you buy a box without a monitor, disk or memory; they'd toss in a copy of the OS, and you could get cheap stuff off the street to make it all work.
HP, on the other hand, burned custom marker code into ROM in their disk drives and you couldn't boot their workstations without one of these -- which cost two to three times what Sun customers were paying for their drives. Also, HP charged huge fees for software distribution media, so that to buy just one HP workstation cost a fortune, and thus you mostly saw them in large, enterprise-wide installs. DEC and others did the same kind of stuff.
So every college student cut their teeth on Sun's stuff, and wanted Sun's stuff when they got out into the workplace. The big problem was that Sun forgot this and started thinking that the servers were selling themselves; they didn't realize that this was the payoff for years of hard work. They began to think that they didn't need the cheap workstations anymore. The SPARCstation 5 had become a joke and they didn't do anything about it.
Partly as a result, instead of Sun workstations in every college lab you now see Linux PCs or even Microsoft stuff, of all things. Consequently Sun was beginning to be excluded from a fair amount of "new thinking" coming out of that environment (witness the Beowulf clusters), and an increasing number of the the young kids starting work now don't care if they ever see an Ultra 10000... they just want a Pentium II "workstation" and a four-way Compaq server.
What I think you are seeing now is that someone at Sun finally noticed the problem and is trying to fix it. "C'mon everybody, the first bag is free!" The more they push out, the cheaper they can make them, and the cheaper they make them, the more they can push out. I don't think Sun would give a damn if these things sold for $79 as long as it meant that the world was suddenly flooded with low-end Suns. Those big mamas in the data center still cost millions of cold, hard dollars, and that's where all the margin is anyway.
--Bob |
