Bill,
As far as current demand goes, how about 20 million set-top
boxes running Java???? That's the deal already signed with
TCI. Royalties never look good if you calculate on a per-licensee
basis. What they make from embedded systems will be enhanced
by the sale of business applications, and platforms like
Java O/S for business that is being co-developed w/IBM.
Then there's the thin clients, sold by SUNW & IBM, the
market for dumb terminals alone is 30+ million just in the
US.
Don't forget the power of mindshare. SUNW's brand is greatly
enhanced by Java. Lots of customers will line up behind their
hardware to support the Java apps they will be running just
because they want to stick with a winner.
As far as Java performance goes, you have a point. SUNW is
set to announce the new JDK 1.2 & it promises to be better &
faster. We'll see. Embedded Java will be fast enough for
just about all the network appliances that are set to come
out & they do get royalties based on unit sales for all of
them. Maybe you don't see the applicability of Java, but I
believe that its limits have yet to be defined.
Java is already the internet standard, and it has become that
way because everyone realizes that there is a lot more money
to be made when everyone can talk to everyone else simply
and cheaply.
What happened in the HWP deal is that SUNW threatened legal action
(ala M$FT) for trademark infringement for their "clean room"
Java. HWP backed down & promised to make their Java compliant.
I didn't hear about any change in the fee structure as a result.
HWP is in no position to challenge the Java standard, especially
after the positive ruling SUNW just received 2 weeks ago against
M$FT.
Mark my words, IBM & SUNW are going to have the enterprise
market sewn up. Who else is left, Bill??? DEC is gone, HWP
might as well pack it in w/HPUX & Merced is an unqualified
disaster for IA-64. They'll have to hustle McKinley out the
door by 2004-2005 to get anywhere near the current SUNW Ultras.
There's Sequent, SCO, & SGI as bit players. There's also
the old Tandem (CPQ) market. I gotta tell you, Bill, that
doesn't constitute what I would term competition for SUNW
& IBM. Even German & Japanese hardware vendors like Siemens
and Fujitsu are going to re-sell Solaris.
M$FT isn't nibbling @SUNW's market. M$FT was never in SUNW's
market. It's SUNW that is clobbering M$FT's market in workgroup
servers with low-end Darwins that came out only this year. Check
the news, Bill, SUNW is selling the 2-4processor servers so
fast they have been back-ordered on them for the last 6 months.
SUNW's low-end servers running Solaris out-perform NT on TPC
benchmarks running Oracle databases. Their total cost of
ownership is lower & even the initial price is lower than NT.
On top of that, NT is a piece of junk that is going nowhere
fast. NT 5.0 (Windows 2000) isn't going to be any better.
cheers,
cherylw |
