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


To: tiquer who wrote (18693)8/19/1999 12:32:00 PM
From: Mephisto  Respond to of 64865
 
Hi, tiquer, I liked the Red Herring article because Perkins explains JAVA's importance.

(Last night I looked at Sun's 1998 Annual Report. It's borring. Accountants must have put it together!)

Excerpts from "The Red Eye" by Tony Perkins

The Red Eye basks in the Sun

By Tony Perkins
Redherring.com
August 19, 1999

"Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) has capitalized
on the Internet opportunity better than any of the other
established computer systems companies. And Sun's
investors have reaped the rewards -- the company's
stock has risen 1,091 percent since Bill Joy introduced
the Java technology story to Red Herring magazine
back in 1995.


It has been, of course, the Java software phenomenon
that has helped brand Sun as one of the great
innovators of the Internet. As chief scientist Bill Joy
likes to brag, Java developers can work twice as fast
as those writing in C++, and in five years this edge will
ten times as fast. Three-quarters of the top 20
Internet service providers use Sun hardware to
operate their back-end operations, as do most of the
dot-com startups.

Interestingly, even Mr. McNealy admits that Sun's
Java technology, which spread like wildfire throughout
the Internet developer community (now a million
strong), came literally out of nowhere, following two
previous failed attempts to implement the technology
for other applications.

But whether it was luck or not, Bill Joy and his band of
happy hackers have turned Java technology into the
centerpiece of Sun's product strategy. A year ago, Mr.
Joy introduced Jini, which leverages Java to connect
disparate devices such as television sets, telephones,
cameras, and printers. The idea behind Jini is that users
will easily be able to identify what devices are on the
network, and how each device can work together.

MAJC POWER

Last week Sun also announced its latest Java-related
innovation, a new superchip called MAJC (for
microprocessor architecture for Java computing,
pronounced "magic"). "We hope MAJC will become
the standard architecture for the post-PC era," said
Mr. Joy, a man who has always claimed that PCs are
largely low quality and uninteresting. These comments,
of course, aren't the first salvo Mr. Joy has hurled at
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), the chipmaking king of the PC
business. Mr. Joy was also the codesigner of the
SPARC microprocessor that has powered Sun's
workstations and servers for several years running.

The value of the new MAJC technology is that it turns
a single chip into a parallel-processing computer that
can handle huge audio and video data streams at
speeds that would short-circuit even Intel's high-end
microprocessors. Its modular design also means it's
scalable from the cheapest Internet device to Sun's
fastest server.

One of Sun's great challenges is that it fights its battles
alone. It has its own operating system, chips, and
development software. And the company has not been
overly successful at licensing any of these technologies
to other large vendors. Perhaps the Java revolution will
change all of that. But whether Sun can make this
happen or not, its own installed base is growing
enough to keep this innovator in good financial shape."
************************************************************

tiquer, and to complement my morning latte experience, I had a good laugh when I read that Mr. Joy is a man who has always claimed that PCs are largely low quality and uninteresting!

PCs are low quality, but only a few people, like Mr. Joy, would find them uninteresting! <g>

Best wishes,

Mephisto