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

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (21311)	10/15/1999 1:05:00 AM
From: JC Jaros	Respond to of 64865

Well he really drove home this 10 month 'Star march' point. He sounded pretty earnest about pulling off a fast growth world domination thing. -JCJ What's up with the server? "BEHEMOTH" It sounds friendly enough... Edit: 'Edit' works. "BEHEMOTH" reminds me of "BEHEMOTASH" which is the name of a small mountain on the other side of Shasta Dam. You can drive most of the way to the top. There is one particular place which is perhaps the most beautiful 120 degree panorama I've ever seen. You can see Lake Shasta, Pit River bridge, Mt Lassen and the whole Lassen range north to Mt. Shasta, Shastina, Black Butte, Castle Crags all the way around to the Trinity Alps. Beautiful.

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (21311)	10/15/1999 5:08:00 AM
From: JC Jaros	Respond to of 64865

Here's a significant news item we missed during the cc stuff. At least I did. Marco logs in. techweb.com Sun Commits To Star Desktop, Preps Portal (10/14/99, 1:58 p.m. ET) By Guy Middleton, TechWeb Sun is to release an update to StarOffice that would let users easily transfer data to Web-hosted StarPortal services, said Star Office's founder Thursday. Marcos Boerries said the 1-Mbyte upgrade would let StarOffice 5.1 users share office suite data with hosted StarPortal services, when they are launched next year. "Without the capability to synch existing data with what is being hosted you're not going to get far," said Jon Collins, senior analyst at Bloor Research. "Tools like this are the migration path between the two technologies." Boerries detailed Sun's plans for the free software suite at a meeting in London, promising Sun's free release of the productivity applications was "not just to annoy Microsoft." Sun acquired Boerries' Star Division earlier this year and released the desktop client for free in September. Boerries, now a Sun vice president in charge of webtop application development, said Sun believed time was running out for the classical model of software where users paid $300 dollars for an office suite one year then $200 for an upgrade soon after. "It's more about the way software should be architectured." Although Sun has released desktop versions of Star Office Sun president Ed Zander said the key reason for its acquisition of Star Division was for its portal technology which let office applications be deployed, cross platform, over the Web. Boerries said the driver for StarPortal was the proliferation of non-PC devices, such as PDAs and WAP-enabled cell phones that people could use to access and control Web-based information. While Sun's announcement of a free office suite was well received by many, some expressed concern that, with no revenue stream to be derived from the product, particularly the Windows and Linux implementations (the two most popular downloads, according to Sun) the product would not continue to be developed. Boerries denied the commercial launch of StarPortal, due in spring of next year, would lead to neglect of the client-based StarOffice products. "There were a lot of rumors that Sun would discontinue the Linux and Windows versions. 90 percent of our downloads are on Windows and Linux. The Windows and Linux versions are key, key, for us, as is Microsoft Office compatibility. We are committed to support the PC environment as long as it exists. We are ramping up the development, driving new features into both StarOffice Portal and StarOffice Classic [The desktop version], he said." Microsoft announced its intention produce a Web-hosted Microsoft office earlier this year. "Ballmer said they are working on a Web-based office product, that they have been working on for two years -- that must be the first product they didn't talk about two years in advance," said Boerries. Boerries said although Sun was committed to providing StarPortal on a variety of platforms, it would make money from selling Solaris servers to ISPs, "People may start on Linux and NT, but what we believe is as utilization goes up, as connected users ramp up then people will go to a real server, a Sparc Solaris server -- Linux and NT servers will run to the wall." Regardless of platform there are caution and detailed service-level agreements are necessary applications and data are outsourced, said Collins: "I can see people going over to ISP hosted services, then finding they are not getting the service they expect."