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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (27983)	2/18/2000 4:43:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

Cheryl - I hate to start a trend here and fan the tabloid rumors but you are exactly on point again. The cost of ALL capital hardware and software in the big IT shops represents about 10% of total system cost. If SUNW costs 3 times as much, but provides even a 25% reduction in operating costs, the IT shop is money ahead... and most studies show that the cost of administering large numbers of NT systems doing even simple jobs is more than 50% higher than Solaris. The numbers are easy to run... even if MSFT and its hardware partners gave away their products, it would still be cheaper to do those big systems on SUNW products. The OEMs who COULD help to solve this problem are for the most part concentrating on improving their manageability and RAS stories on their high end lines - that is true of IBM, HP and CPQ for sure. Of those three, only CPQ has invested significantly in the same level of support for NT systems, and based on results and MSFT PR, they are getting little support from Redmond in that effort - CPQ's products to support manageability were not even mentioned in the Gates launch. Significantly, a reporter for InfoWeek asked that question of Michael Dell on tuesday morning and got a completely meaningless answer. When they asked the same question of capellas they got a clear description of CPQ's plans in that area. Maybe the reason that story doesn't get much play from MSFT is that CPQ admits that the problem is hard and only beginning to be solved.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (27983)	2/18/2000 7:49:00 PM
From: nihil	Respond to of 64865

I just rely on professionally measured benchmarks. All of my computer business engineer friends and relatives complain that they are required to install and use NT because their non-IT bosses require them to buy Microsoft in response to formal bids. They just want to sit around the office and read which they can with Sun. But occasionally with NT they have to do some work. (Call up the MSFT help-line because most of them are to proud to learn how to reinstall the operating system.