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

To: cfimx who wrote (25625)	1/3/2000 8:39:00 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

what intc did to the desktop, they will do to the server. I can't figure how you're so sure of that. INTC, like MSFT, was elected king of the desktop by IBM in 1981. IBM branded INTC's inferior 8/16 hybrid 8088, technically the worst 16 bit processor from that time, with the only stamp of credibility that corporate America could swallow. Dumb ole sh*ts from the previous generation of IT managers didn't know or care what a PC was, but knew it was OK if it said IBM on it. Today's Pentium III still supports the critical LAHF instruction (as does the Itanic). INTC has become good at many things and Grove is a savvy manager, but they're still basically riding that 1980 monopoly-conferring design win, as are Bill and Steve in the software department. Things are different now. For one thing among many, the 8088 was simple enough so that two kids in a garage could write all the foundation software required. The Itanic is far from that, and Microsoft is more a marketing company than an engineering company. Intel not only has to bring off a multifaceted engineering/logistics feat that's three times harder than anything they've done, but they need your buddies Bill and Steve to do the same (only for them the required difference might be an order of magnitude). You take the two fractional probabilities, and you multiply them. I'll bet on the entry that's already shipping, thank you. --QS

To: cfimx who wrote (25625)	1/3/2000 8:59:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 64865

what intc did to the desktop, they will do to the server. Seems like it might be worth noticing that Intel makes chips, where it has had dominant market share, motherboards, where it sells some, and sometimes systems, where it hasn't sold a lot. I.e., what Intel has done to the desktop is to supply chips which, by and large, other people used to build systems that now dominate the desktop, but do so because of the WinTel combination, not because of Intel's own superiority in systems. On the system side, people have been making servers for as long as the Intel chips have been around. As time has gone on, the more and more powerful Intel chips have seemed more relevant for the server since who needs that much power on the desktop (at least until MSFT comes out with a new bloated version that soaks up that power). And, at the low end those Intel-based servers have become more and more common, some running NT (to help soak up that extra power) and some running a version of Unix (for people who actually care). But, Intel-based servers have never been a very strong force in larger servers despite the efforts of Sequent and the like to make them so. Ever more powerful Intel chips will raise the barrier some, but really being successful in moving up the ladder will require very good system architecture ... something the RISC boys have been good at for a long time.