Jim, what else do you know besides losing Superbowls?
Sun will be reduced to the role of a boxmaker and system integrator in a few years? Well, as far as I know, NT has not been scalable enough to cut into mid-range/high range server market. When will NT 5.0 be stable enough to capture that part of the market? Sun is already announcing they will introduce the next generation of Solaris next week in New York, and that version is the 64 bit version of OS that MSFT don't plan on releasing till 2000 as scheduled now. And I think you know that SUNW also license the Java technology. Granted it hasn't produced huge revenue, however, it's gaining momentum and is becoming the de-facto in consumer electronics and other apps. So I am not sure why are you categorizing SUNW as a hardware company solely. The matter is that NT will improve, so will Solaris, and application software will also become more complex. Scalability, open architecture will be what determine who will succeed and who will fail. SUNW has not shown that they are letting MSFT technology get ahead of them, and their market shares in mid-range to high-range server market is actually increasing. They have built a pretty loyal customer bases. It's doubtful that these customers will abandon SUNW in a few years and embrace MSFT. Plus, you can buy a low end SPARC server for about $3500 now. Given a choice of a $2500 NT workstation and a $3500 Solaris machine, I might opt for the scalability and reliability of a Solaris.
Put it plainly, NT is good for the chicken shit, children apps. For critical financial data transaction, high performance scientific computation apps, I would put my trust in SUNW. I don't think with a 60M lines of source code, you can expect NT to ever reach the kind of stability, scalability that these mission critical apps require. Software quality degrades as code size increase, not improve. That is the 1st lesson in Computer Engineering. The simpler, leaner the software, the more elegant it will be. NT is not a software jewel, and don't expect NT to dominate every phase of the computer market.
And lastly, I did NOT say Solaris is 50,000 lines of elegant code, I said a real time UNIX micro kernel QNX version of UNIX is 50K lines of code. That's a big difference. Solaris might be millions lines of codes, but it's still leaner than NT.
<Sun's OS (Solaris) is hardly 50,000 lines of elegant code as you seem to have implied. The UNIX tower of BABEL is on its way out. People are voting with their pocket books.> |
