While the some institution chose to shift away from SUN workstation
to DECs or PC, you have to remember that education market is not
necessarily a big revenue generator for SUN. In fact, I would
tend to believe that these workstation companies make very little
money from universities. The workstation companies often sell
to universities at an 50% or more discount. In fact many times,
computer company sell at a loss to universities in order to use
their names in their marketing effort. The fact remains, the
highest performance PC barely nips at the lowest end SUN
workstations in terms of performance. SUN will have new products
that will be aimed directly at high-end Pentium Pro PCs. Build
around a highly integrated design - a SPARC core and PCI interface
on chip - this machine will sell about $5000. DEC Alpha remains
an intriguing story. They are certainly very competitive products,
but in terms of unix workstations, I still prefer SUNs.
As far as SUN goes, I still look at the positives. SUN has bet
the farm on becoming the premiere network computing company in
the industry. Their Network servers remains a big time hot item.
For example, ATT Worldnet, an internet provider that has become
a serious threat to AOL, uses SUN network servers exclusively.
SUN has also expanded its markets by partners up with anybody
who is involved in networking technologies. They have been
server providing technology to likes of CISCO. Somewhere in
CISCO network products there is a piece of SUN in there. What
I am really saying is that, SUN does not only generate revenue
from Workstation, but has branched out to many other areas in
network technology. In this respect, PC companies and DEC
aren't really direct threat to SUN.
- Chung |
