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

To: jim kelley who wrote (24941)	12/16/1999 9:32:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 64865

The benchmarks are important, as I said previously, for marketing purposes, but only because everyone uses them and many people analyzing systems don't understand systems well enough to know any better and won't take the effort to do proper benchmarking. And, it is certainly the case that benchmarks measure something ... it just is often far from linear what that something has to do with the real world. As a result, a box that has mediocre numbers in standard benchmarks can turn out to be the best performer for a particular application. Not that it will always be so by any means. Sometimes the current hot box really does put together all the right stuff and it is hot pretty much all around. Also, track record in a given area can be very important in this kind of selection. If you are getting ready to do X and you know that a large number of other people who do X use system Y, then system Y is going to be high on your list even if system Z claims to be the latest and greatest. This is not just a question of sticking with the market leader, but can include issues like confidence that the vendor knows the application, reliability, appropriate configurability, etc. All of which boils down to two main points relative to your citations of benchmarks: 1) Benchmarks don't tell the whole story; there is a lot more that should go into system purchase decisions that that; and 2) There is more at play in such purchase decisions; the latest high score doesn't instantly displace an established leader (who may well take the lead again with the next round). I'm not a rabid supporter of Sun platforms as the be-all and end-all of everything out there. In fact, until recently I was inclined to use HP-UX systems because of a long track record of happy results doing so. The Forte acquisition gave me a potential vested interest in looking at Sun again and so far I am liking what I see ... not to mention the favorable impact on my formerly Forte stock.