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

To: JDN who wrote (36247)	10/8/2000 12:17:45 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Re: Light Bulbs What better example would one expect from someone studying at Jack Welch's knee? An example which would be instantly understood by GE's board of directors (to whom Scott is undoubtedly selling)? Ignoring the specific example the key message (which I agree with) is that the Internet is the means to transform stodgy low-margin "product" businesses into high-growth, higher-margin "services" businesses. Enabling GE, for example, to move from "lighting products" to "lighting services". This is a trend which flows naturally from the emerging pervasiveness of the net. For a good perspective on these trends see Neil Gershenfeld's "When Things Start to Think" (available at amazon.com ) which I'm sure McNealy has read. The key point is that the internet, like predecessor technologies, only really starts to come into its own when it fades into the fabric of daily life and becomes invisible. We're a long way from that point, which is why Scott is absolutely correct that the real internet revolution has hardly begun. There's only one catch. Nobody is willing to pay for "GE brand" electricity coming out of their wall sockets. There is no such thing as "proprietary ubiquity". While McNealy, as a good marketer, is incapable of saying the word "server" without the prefix "Sun", visions of "Sun tone" need to be tempered by the reality that in a universally connected world infrastructure is almost by definition a commodity. As the internet matures it is inevitable that the fiber optics cable business will become as dull as the copper wiring business it replaces (GLW becomes just another BWC, for example) and equally that servers and storage, switches and routers fade into the anonymous background. We're far from that point but that's where things will head over time. The interesting thing about the picks and shovels business is that there is no better place to be in the early stages of a gold rush. But as soon as the gold rush passes picks and shovels get seen for what they really are: commodity items.