Hi Jock, >>>The decline in
Sun's business was one of the reasons Erica Klauer cited in her downgrade of LSI.<<<
I think she's premature about Sun's business declining. Sun's recent quarterly results also disagree with her. The reason Sun and UNIX aren't falling is because the "self fulfilling prophecy" about NT rapidly replacing UNIX isn't happening, because a lot of mid size and probably all large size workstation and server users are still leary of NT. Sun is undoubtedly losing low end workstation business to PCs, but they are making up for it at the high end (Starfire, aka E10000 series). Whenever anyone starts saying the mainframe (or UNIX, now) is dead, I have to drag out this post of mine (bottom of this post) to the Intel thread from earlier this year. It's mostly about S390 (MVS, IBM and compatibles) but you could sub in UNIX for a lot of it, especially in the scalability aspect. Also, apparently NT still crashes a lot more than UNIX. Another big boost for UNIX is the fact that Intel is getting into the foray:
NEW YORK, Sept 17 (Reuters) - Intel Corp. said it has
embarked on an effort to make peace among the computer companies
selling the Unix operating system, a move that could exacerbate
tensions with longtime partner Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O, the
Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Intel said Wednesday it will be working with major computer
makers to develop common guidelines for Unix, the first time the
Santa Clara, Calif., company has attempted such an effort, the
report said.
The companies comprise all the major Unix hardware
companies, and are often bitter rivals selling high-end business
computers using the Unix operating system, and each of them
provides a slightly different version of the software, the
report said.
Those differences are enough to preclude the same
application programme from running on different Unix computers,
one of the reasons that Unix has been losing ground to
Microsoft's rival Windows NT operating system, the Journal said.
While Unix suppliers have tried many times over the years to
develop a single version of the operating systems, their
marketplace rivalries always got in the way of an agreement, the
report said.
REUTERS
Rtr 05:21 09-17-98
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