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

To: JDN who wrote (32036)	5/18/2000 8:42:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

JDN - people DO acknowledge that SUNW sells a complete system - that has been the reason they buy even though SPARC is slower than the competition, hardware is higher priced, etc. But the competition in that space also does the "system sale". IBM has a much more complete story in overall infrastructure, everything from business process all the way down to the cable layout. HP is no slouch in that business. CPQ has more service people than SUNW has employees. Every vendor claims that the next generation will blow away the competition. The market leader can get some mileage from that - customers will wait a bit to stay with their current platform. But if the differential becomes too great, then some start to switch, and eventually position erodes. That happened to CPQ in the volume server business - they had a huge share advantage which has, over the last few years, dropped substantially, although they still have twice the next guy (DELL) in units. Engineering schedules are always a tradeoff between time to market and cost. I think SUNW has done a great job of managing their development costs against competitive position. They mix controlled development money with great field execution, and great PR spin. We can see the difference between the old DEC, which in the mid-90s was investing 5 times the R&D money that SUNW spent, all the time losing market share to SUNW. So I'm not even sure I would suggest a change in strategy, but they can not, as some here suggest, make it happen without taking the next steps. The next product transition is very important and needs to happen on schedule or they really will open that market window the competition is talking about.