Hi Chung - Do you think MCI WorldCom would make a similar comment about Sun Solaris?
(http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980930S0003)
From the article: "...Netscape and Intel may be cranking up support of Linux with their investment in Red Hat Software Tuesday, but not all ISPs, particularly the largest one, plan to quickly embrace this suddenly popular version of Unix.
John Sidgmore, vice chairman of MCI WorldCom, said his own company, which owns Uunet Technologies, has had a lot of internal debate about Linux, but hasn't made a decision about whether it's something the carrier wants to support.
"I really don't know -- there's been no testing [of Linux]," said Sidgmore, prior to his keynote presentation at ISPCon here in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday. "[Linux] seems to come out of nowhere, and those things always scare me." ..."
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Sunw should capitalize on this opportunity and provide it's SOLARIS OS to MCI (and MCI customers) free of charge. Perhaps a SOLARIS lite version (w/o the JVM machine). Then charge for the JVM license and any new upgrades. This "special offer" is available for a limited time only (i.e. for the period while NT5 is in beta testing).
Sunw will be able to leverage on this opportunity to sell a lot more new hardware (servers and storage soultions) while providing the most current (software) OS free of charge.
There will always be future updates to the OS (which you can charge the customer for at a pro-rated fee), but you have to get the customers in the door first. This type of strategy would deliver new customers to our OS (w/ all the upgrade potential at a fee) and nip these NT5 upgrades in the bud ... (MS would not like this!).
Just some thoughts but as a shareholder, I would see this "in your face" marketing approach as this is something Microsoft would have a hard time competing with. Remember MS does not sell hardware or storage solutions.
EKS |
