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

To: Sonki who wrote (22243)	11/3/1999 11:57:00 PM
From: C. Zuck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

"how does sunw get away w. this? this is just to start with?" Just so you know, an Ultra 80 can in no way be compared to a high-end Compaq or Dell desktop "workstation". The Wintel machine is a souped-up Chevy; the Ultra is a top-of-the-line Porsche. A 450 MHz Sparc processor is worlds ahead of a 600 MHz Intel processor. I leave it to the more technically adept to explain the ramifications of RISC, etc. Suffice it to say, the 3 yr old Ultra 1 on my desk at work will outperform any Wintel machine (in terms of stability and multi-tasking, and probably raw speed) and I never, ever get the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death. As a point of interest, my company was planning to migrate all Solaris-based engineering applications to Windows NT. That plan has been abandoned (no further details known; I work for Dow 30 aerospace engineering firm).

To: Sonki who wrote (22243)	11/3/1999 11:57:00 PM
From: JC Jaros	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

how does sunw get away w. this? Volume! <g> sonki- it's the Sun branded unix/risc thing. Pretty cool, huh? :) -JCJ

To: Sonki who wrote (22243)	11/4/1999 12:13:00 AM
From: Charles Tutt	Respond to of 64865

What do you mean "get away w.?"

To: Sonki who wrote (22243)	11/4/1999 10:11:00 AM
From: Stormweaver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

With prices like that it's clear that they are betting the farm on Sun Ray's displacing PC's. They don't have a midterm desktop strategy and as a result they won't be expanding their desktop market; more trying to hold they're share of the 4% desktops which are UNIX ... a share that is constantly under attack from x86 + NT/Linux. OTOH, If they could pull some marketing hype like Apple and get some funky colours who knows - they just may be able to push them regardless of the price ;) ? Cheers James

To: Sonki who wrote (22243)	11/4/1999 3:41:00 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Respond to of 64865

Sonki, You're right. They ARE expensive machines. The processor is just one part of the equation. SUNW's bus that connects the system memory with the video processor is much faster than that of a PC, so it's a great graphics workstation. The only real competition is from SGI. However, not everyone needs this high-speed access to the screen. SUNW won't sell these by the bushel, but scientific and engineering applications will buy them without thinking twice about it. It's really a small price to pay for anyone requiring high-speed graphics and great reliability. SUNW's brand-name with all their other products doesn't hurt either. They won't be able to get away with it when someone else comes up with a lower-cost equivalent (the emphasis is on equivalent). Then SUNW MUST lower their high cost to stay competitive. The fact they have not done so yet speaks volumes about the quality and pricing of the competition. cheers, cherylw