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

To: Stormweaver who wrote (22262)	11/4/1999 1:48:00 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

1. Equal or better application functionality; as compared to Windows. You mean a video editing app? I hope you don't mean an office suite or e-mail or browser, which is all 95% of users need. This argument either already is, or is within months of being, invalid. 2. Security ; my data is stored out there on some disk. The technology is there now for you to encrypt anything you want yourself, and with a Sunray your data file doesn't travel on the wire in the clear. As far as more user-friendly automatic encrypted storage schemes go, ASP's will have to provide them, but all necessary technology exists. This is not something that's years away. Further, you could make the argument that your data is more secure in the other sense on an ASP's redundant, continually-backed-up server than on your single-point-of-mechanical-failure hard disk running under an operating system that writes garbage over FATs on alternate Thursdays. 3. Net bandwidth - just not there yet. It is there for the enterprise, not for home users. 4. Stability: unproven technology, if the server goes down or my network has problems my desktop is dead. James, give a guy a break. A Microsoft advocate using stability as an argument? How much of all this "extra productivity" from PC's gets eaten up the first time you have to restore your system from scratch? And as far as depending on the network goes, my full-function 2-processor NT machine with 70GB of disk, 384MB of memory and 2 SCSI busses is already mostly a paperweight if my DSL services get cut off. 5. Cost/benefit; if I can buy a fully functional PC for a couple hundred dollars more then what's the point. The point is that the couple of hundred dollars gets dwarfed by TCO anti-productivity costs in an amazing hurry if you have to back the machine up, cope with crashes, reboots, bullsht Norton system administration utilities that no end user should ever have to know about (defragment your disk and image the file system, then optimize the registry grandma, and I'm sure everything will be fine), etc. etc. etc. That couple of hundred dollars is absolutely* the worst deal in consumerdom. You're better off spending your money on the Home Shopping Network or Thighmasters. Regards, --QwikSand

To: Stormweaver who wrote (22262)	11/4/1999 1:58:00 PM
From: cfimx	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

james, I would add only one more thing to your analysis, which i believe is DEAD ON ( it's actually scary how much are respective views of the world overlap!) That is, by the time all the stuff that needs to happen to make SUNRAY viable, happens, the wintel PC will be SO easy to use, even the guys around here won't complain about them. That's the achilles heal of the "replace all the PCs" argument. They're talking about a moving target here. In fact, next year, the PC loses the legacy add in cards and goes totally USB. Rather than throwing out the PC's in 2000 and beyond, corporations will instead go on a monumental upgrade to W2k Pro, and o2k.

To: Stormweaver who wrote (22262)	11/4/1999 3:36:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

One of the problems with any PC versus whatever-we-hope-will-replace-it-this-week discussion is that everything keeps changing so that one comparison made today may not be valid tomorrow. This makes predictions devilishly hard... not to make, of course, but to be right and right for the right reasons. I can't imagine anyone expecting Sunray or anything like it to create massive displacement of existing Windows boxes any time soon. The best one is likely to hope for soon would be meaningful market share in new systems, i.e., expansion or upgrade of seats. There are clearly many desktops which will remain Windows for a long time because the users sitting at them have particular collections of software which they will not easily duplicate on another platform, but realistically, this isn't a large percentage, especially of new seats. A very large percentage of current corporate users use one main application that defines their job. If they are fiscal in roll, this is some kind of accounting application; if clerical then office type. There is some crossover, but I'll bet that a good survey would show that a large percentage of corporate users needed little more than the one application that defines their job. They might use their PC for other things, like surfing, but that isn't necessarily a benefit to management. One of the interesting combinations of factors which I see playing into this is that PCs have gotten so powerful that the main benefit for most users of upgrading rests only in trying to support bloated new versions of software that don't actually have any positive impact on their jobs. At the same time, MS seems to be intent on producing new versions of Windows that require massive upgrades of the underlying platform whether you run any application software on it or not. Given even a modest trend toward using browsers and Java clients for access to either ASP or in-house apps, isn't it a bit ironic that the application is so lightweight and the need for iron coming from the OS only? It wouldn't surprise me to see a lot of corporations taking a go slow approach to W2K because of this. Would you upgrade 20,000 desktops for no particular benefit? I can't see the TCO argument in favor of Sunray clients resulting in large numbers of adoptions overnight, valid though it may be. But, it could be that, as some success stories accumulate, that snowballing would take place. This sure won't be overnight though. More likely, I think, will be people insisting on continuing to use W95 boxes in order to get some useful life out of them.

To: Stormweaver who wrote (22262)	11/4/1999 8:26:00 PM
From: jhg_in_kc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

James, doesnt CTXS solve the problem? You can have Windows on any old computer and not have to buy the software? <I contend that currently there is nothing close to the simplicity/power for users than a Windows desktop. Thin client (a.k.a. marketing dept renamed to Sun Ray) must solve these issues before becoming accepted; which IMHO will be years away: 1. Equal or better application functionality; as compared to Windows. 2. Security ; my data is stored out there on some disk. 3. Net bandwidth - just not there yet. 4. Stability: unproven technology, if the server goes down or my network has problems my desktop is dead. 5. Cost/benefit; if I can buy a fully functional PC for a couple hundred dollars more then what's the point. Once these are in place they need to try and convince the corporate world to switch. Convince them to spend millions of dollars buying new hardware, retraining people and translating stored data into new formats.>