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

To: QwikSand who wrote (35512)	9/19/2000 5:11:06 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

QS - I recognize the issues around fiefdoms, and that sometimes going outside is the only way to make progress. But just yesterday JC was over on the MSFT thread talking about how easy it is to build a good firewall on a 10 year old 486 with Linux (I happen to agree with him there). Surely Sun could have enabled a skunk works project to knock this out. That's what I did a number of times when I was still in the game. I know enough about this class of product to know that a team of 10 software folks and a couple of hardware engineers could have been set up off-campus and produced a prototype in a couple of months. Most of the pieces are either in Sun or available on the market, and there are also a lot of wanna-be companies with decent technology that could be bought for a song. Any of that warren of small tech companies in the area could provide space. This suggests to me that the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit which was a part of the Sun I worked with in the late 80s and early 90s is less a part of the picture today. I suspect that there are not to many commenting here who really know much about COBT but as far as I can tell, there is NOTHING which sets them apart - no disruptive technology, no fancy software, just a once-unique idea which COBT failed to execute on in time to get a viable business going. If Sun's goal is to take this product and infuse it with Sun technology, why buy the company in the first place? They don't have much of a customer base, they don't even have a lot of share. Their products are second rate and badly in need of a refresh. I also don't see a shift away from SPARC as a good thing at the moment. Maybe I just don't see the whole picture and I will see the value in the fullness of time.