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To: Paul Engel who wrote (138116)	6/25/2001 7:42:43 PM
From: tcmay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

80-20 rule << TC - Re: "We are seeing at the high end just a replay of the "industry standard, open architecture" history seen in the 1980s and 90s with PCs." That appears to be what is playing out. However, 2 camps developed & survived - the Wintel Camp and Apple (as you so rightly know !). In this case, SUN appears to be a real close "analogue" of Apple - manufacturing both the hardware and the Solaris OS. >> Agreed. There may be several small niches, but the usual "80-20" rule of thumb will likely apply: the dominant player will get 80% of the design wins, with the rest splitting the remaining 20%. (Sometimes this is a 90-10 rule.) What's intriguing is that the battle now appears to be shifting to the OS. Besides Windows 2000/XP, there are several flavors of Linux (though mostly very similar), flavors of BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, even Apple's OS X is a flavor of BSD), and various flavors of industrial-strength Unix/BSD: Solaris, True64, the Monterey project, SCO, too many variants for me to keep track of. Even a variant of VMS (from Compaq/Digital, now to be ported to the IA-64). Were I Microsoft, with all of the powerful and time-tested Unices out there, I'd be paranoid that Windows 2000/XP may _not_ be the big winner in IA-64 systems. (Windows 2000/XP surely will be the winner in desktops for years to come, but the IA-64 looks to be getting very strong Unix support. Microsoft may find themselves headed off at the pass in several years, as ordinary desktops start to make use of IA-64.) --Tim May -_T

To: Paul Engel who wrote (138116)	6/26/2001 4:18:10 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Ref- <That appears to be what is playing out. However, 2 camps developed & survived - the Wintel Camp and Apple (as you so rightly know !). In this case, SUN appears to be a real close "analogue" of Apple - manufacturing both the hardware and the Solaris OS. > AND THEN THERE WERE TWO ?? From the marketing point of view a two mainframe CPU vendor strategy a la the personal computer business is highly likely. One mainstream solution, and one appeals to those who want to be different ( a la Apple). If we expect Itanium to be the mainstream solution, you expected Sun to be the alternate platform. However we are forgetting IBM ! IBM continues to ride two horses, the PowerPC and the Itanium. I doubt that we can expect IBM to exit the CPU business for several years. Too much of IBM's pride and ego is tied up in making mainframe CPUs, even though the non-CPU business is now a big chunk of IBM profits. Compared to Sun, IBM has a much larger revenue base to fund CPU development, and it has the advantage of leading edge silicon technologies, while Sun has to depend upon foundries. Thus there is much more pressure on Sun to dump SPARC. I think that it is easier for Sun to dump SPARC, since ten years ago Sun used Motorola CPUs, so there is less of an ego issue. SO IT WILL BE A THREESOME Until Sun sees the light !