Hi David,
I'll try to explain the over all market as clearly as possible for you. There were two types of computers called the PC and the other workstation. PC's are sold by companies such as Dell, Compaq, Packard Bell, Gateway 2000, etc. Workstations are sold by Sun, IBM, SGI, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment, etc. What is the difference?
Workstations are more powerful and are marketed to professionals involved in the stock market, engineers and they can be used as servers for the internet.
The current market share report by Dataquest shows that SUN owns 41.7% of the market, which by the way is greater than IBM, H-P, DEC and SGI combined. Windows NT owns about 20% of the market share. This is based on revenue(sales). Sun has increased marketshare from 36.1 to 41.7. This reflects the quality of their new products involving the UltraSparc chip.
As far as comparing Windows NT vs. UNIX, there is no comparision! The current UNIX workstations are far superior in speed, graphics up to 50% better. However, UNIX workstations cost atleast twice as much.
All the uproar is about Compaq and PC's workstations that use Microsoft's Windows NT. These companies are trying to and have been somewhat successful penatrating the lower end market, usually less than $10,000 for a workstation.
In response Sun has put on a two-fold attack. The first phase by lowering the Ultrasparc workstations prices by as must as 38%, this will squeeze the margins for it's Windows NT competitors. The second phase was to attack the PC market with what is called an NC or Javastation.
A javastation is a networking computer that will hook to a server, on that server the person can use it for anything. For more information go to SUN's homepage and get the whitepapers. its at
sun.com
As for strategies there is another SUNW thread in Silicon Investor that I started up that talks about SUN vs. MICROSOFT. Go to stocks, then computers and we're the one right before this one called Does anyone know anything about Sun's NC.
I hope I helped a little,
Ellison |
