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

To: Mephisto who wrote (24515)	12/10/1999 2:00:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

Mephisto - I think you are confused about Jim Kelley's use of the term "good management". He is referring to DELL-style tight fiscal management. DELL does almost no research (thus huge ROIC since I is small), drove the lowest production costs in the industry, has a negative inventory carrying cost (they get the money on average before inventory costs are incurred), etc. I am a big fan of Sun's management style and have been since near the time when the company was founded. My experience in working with Sun was that they were more concerned with "doing the right thing" and bringing neat ideas to reality than in driving the last penny to the bottom line. Sun managers are more likely to take an engineer's perspective than a business manager's viewpoint. That has resulted in a relatively high infrastructure cost, and high cost of goods sold, and high R&D costs, relative to SUNW's Wintel peers. The examples you point out are the kind of things that make me like SUNW's management - top notch products, great benchmarks... Java would never have come to market from DELL - in fact no software products would come from DELL. Different idea of what management is all about. So let's not confuse successful management by what is essentially a bunch of engineers with management designed by and implemented by business people with little technical interest or heritage. I would agree that SUNW's management has produced a great technology company but it is not "good management" in the sense that Proctor and Gamble or Coca Cola would define that term.