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

To: JDN who wrote (35399)	9/17/2000 8:11:01 AM
From: Steve Lee	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

"Just ANOTHER reason why the World and Europe in particular MUST continue to upgrade their computer and internet and intranet communications systems." In many ways, northern Europe is far ahead of the US in terms of adopting and implementing new technology (even though much of that technology originates from the US). I think a big reason that the US productivity increases outpace Europe is more a matter of attitude. Europe is full of bureaucrats and interventionists - basically incompetent govt spending masses of public money on wasteful projects, stifling entrepreneurial spirit. And many of the major companies are still run by old men who got their jobs by sleeping with their schoolmasters at snooty schools.

To: JDN who wrote (35399)	9/17/2000 8:51:18 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

SUN MICROSYSTEMS' MODULAR STRUCTURE EMERGES AS BLUEPRINT FOR SUCCESS By David Warsh The Boston Globe September 17, 2000 It began with a mystery. In 1985, Harvard Business School professor Kim Clark was writing a case on a little Silicon Valley upstart named Sun Microsystems, which was challenging Chelmsford's Apollo Computers in the booming market for computer workstations. Tom Vanderslice, one of the top executives in America, was CEO of Apollo. He ran it by the book, flawlessly executing one B-school textbook maneuver after another. Sun was run by kids. Somehow they were building low-price, high-performance machines using off-the-shelf components and open software--and clobbering Apollo. "We were looking at their manufacturing systems and their product-development cycle," remembers Clark. "It looked like smoke and mirrors." About the same time, a young finance professor named Carliss Baldwin became interested in Sun's unorthodox approach to its balance sheet. The company was going to the capital markets far more often than the models dictated, amassing a sizeable war chest. The researchers met, compared notes and concluded this was not just another company competing for a segment of a market. They decided to collaborate. All that's history now. Apollo is defunct. So is Digital Equipment Corp., the one-time giant from which it had sprung. Otherwise, Silicon Valley and IBM rolled up Massachusetts' minicomputer industry as completely as the croupier sweeps losing bets from a roulette table. How? Why? Baldwin and Clark discovered that the secret of Sun's success was in the architecture of its system. From the lowest-level circuits within microprocessors to the highest-level system software and applications programs, Sun's system was essentially modular. Its products could be connected easily to one another and to other systems, like so many digital Tinkertoys. Fifteen years later, the authors have produced a book about their discovery of a little-recognized but pervasive phenomenon of the modern world--its exploding complexity--and the single-best tactic yet devised for coping with it. "Design Rules: The Power of Modularity" argues that the future belongs to those who learn to separate the world into component parts, the better to render tasks manageable and decisions susceptible to coordination. The book (the first of two volumes) definitely isn't for the timid. There are schematic diagrams, statistical graphics and plenty of algebra. But then it is not every day that the dean of the Harvard Business School (Clark rose through the ranks) teams up with one of his most promising finance professors to produce an unorthodox history of the most important industry of our times--in order to unearth some new general principles. The story begins in 1964, with the rollout of IBM's System/360, the first truly modular computer design. A module is a unit whose structural elements are powerfully connected among themselves and relatively weakly connected to other units. The essence of the System/360 was that its components could be mixed and matched. The development of the Unix operating system at Bell Laboratories was another landmark in modularity, the authors write. The software was powerful, flexible, small, elegant and easy to use. Nested regular hierarchical structures, with rigorous partition of design information into hidden and visible subsets, clean interfaces and easy tests of individual modules, have become standard throughout the computer and Internet worlds. Those who have understood this have prospered; those who didn't have fallen behind. Nor is it just computers. What retail company is more thoroughly modular than Wal-Mart? By focusing on modularity, Baldwin and Clark have created a more general vocabulary to discuss phenomena much debated in recent years. God still resides in the details. But if Baldwin and Clark are right, business success begins with the architecture.