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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stormweaver who wrote (17059)	6/11/1999 12:31:00 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

1. It slows innovation cycles ; committee drag factor. Yes that has always been a serious problem. 2. Lose competitive edge; giving away tech. Sun has given away RPC, NIS, RFS (NFS), and has contributed significantly to the expansion of the once useless POSIX API's (especially wrt to threading). This is an edge that they could have kept to differentiate themselves from HP/IBM/SGI etc. No, most people in the Unix community believe just the opposite. The Open Systems philosophy says interfaces are public, compete on implementation. Its descendant, the Open Source philosophy, says even implementations are public, compete on service and support. At the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft says "We 'listen to our customers' and are active in the industry, but we own everything." (Translation: "We're a monopoly so if you don't like it go f*k yourself.") One major reason, though far from the only reason, that Unix lost to Microsoft was that it never could un-fragment itself. Unix was too preoccupied with 'intellectual property', starting with the mad-dog lawyers at AT&T in the 1980's. It's not that anybody lost a competitive technology edge by sharing. It's that, for the first reason you cited, the Unix contingent shared too little too late* so that software developers never had a single version to write to, and still don't today. Frustration with this is one of the psychological underpinnings of Linux' popularity among Unix people. The joke is that Linux, as it grows, may face the same kind of problems. Regards, --QwikSand

To: Stormweaver who wrote (17059)	6/11/1999 1:29:00 PM
From: Prognosticator	Respond to of 64865

I'm concerned with the lack of focus and agressiveness in Sun management though. I'm just lowly investor/techie yet I see opportunities being missed left and right; as we discussed earlier. They appear to be just trying to ride the current wave and I don't see any bold moves to generate new revenue streams and a lackadaisical (had to look that one up) attitude toward the desktop. Actually, they created the current wave (Java), and have the skill to ride it. For bold new moves, how about their Telecoms and Appliance initiatives (not bad for an iron vendor). I agree that they haven't been focused on the desktop, and that Solaris x86 won't displace Windows, but I'll be switching to it just as soon as all the software I use is Java, and the desktop becomes interchangeable. I'm tired of bluescreens. P.