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

To: Thomas Mercer-Hursh who wrote (25100)	12/19/1999 10:47:00 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

Re: UNIX variants I agree that people don't assemble servers piecemeal. The key to increasing margins via differentiation is to sell "solutions" rather than a box and that is exactly why proprietary UNIX variants exist today. Neither SUNW nor any of its competitors want to sell you a box. They want to sell you a SUNW (or HWP, IBM, etc.) "solution" to your problem. It is vital therefore, to maintain differentiation to avoid the sort of commoditization that exists in the PC space today and having multiple UNIX variants which each vendor can claim is "better" than the others is one of the keys to accomplishing this goal. Prior to the emergence of Linux there was no incentive for any UNIX vendor to bridge the gap. While SUNW might in theory have ported Solaris to run on HWP's PA-RISC or IBM's PowerPC architectures there would be little practical reason to do so other than to undercut SUNW's own SPARC hardware line. While all vendors preach interoperability and migration paths, no vendor wants to make it easy for customers to migrate away from their hardware offerings. Linux, however, cannot be "proprietized", and as it continues to add the sort of RAS features and other functions formerly found only in the proprietary UNIX variants it will be harder and harder to seriously claim that a proprietary UNIX variant is "better" than the open standard version (Linux). SUNW's programmers may know SPARC better and IBM's programmers may know PowerPC better, but a million graduate students spread across thousands of universities around the world are going to continue to refine and enhance Linux at a pace the proprietary vendors will find difficult to match. The hardware they will optimize to will be INTC because that is what will be most readily available and I have no doubt that INTC will make sure that university computer science departments working on Linux are kept well stocked with the latest INTC hardware at rock-bottom prices. Moreover, as these students graduate and enter the business world they will carry their Linux bias with them. Over time Linux will become the easy "default" choice. Anything else will be the "hard" choice requiring special justification. This is just repeating UNIX's original migration from academia into the corporate world of prior years. The long-term viability of proprietary UNIX variants in the face of the Linux standard is thus very much in doubt.