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

To: High-Tech East who wrote (46757)	1/2/2002 2:58:33 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Hi Ken, This is a hit piece by a biased writer contributing to Fortune magazine. I don't know the author and I don't really care about the author. But following is an example of why this article is skewed.... "...A visit with John McKinley, CIO at Merrill Lynch, highlights the problem. Merrill is one of Sun's best customers. Sun uses Merrill in advertisements and encourages the firm to talk to the media about their relationship. And McKinley certainly doesn't mince words when talking about Sun's technology: "They still make the best high-end server on the planet." But at Merrill it is Dell and Microsoft, not Sun, that are winning the battle for new tech spending. The reason, McKinley says, is simple: Dell machines are so cheap that their total cost--hardware, software, and maintenance--is now 40% less than what it costs him to run Sun machines. Merrill's entire retail call center, handling tens of millions of customers a day, now runs on Dell machines, and Merrill is finding ways to use them on the trading floor too. "Traders are just like the rest of us,'' he says. "They'd rather use the same machine at work as they do at home."..." The key operative words in this paragraph are "entire retail call center". According to the author Dell & M$FT are "winning the battle for new tech spending". His example? The retail call center @Merrill Lynch. So we are to believe that Sun is going down the tubes because Merrill Lynch has decided to use PC's in their retail call center? I don't think so. Their retail call center is the equivalent of a secretarial pool. The real account mgmt that goes on @Merrill is not running Dell/M$FT now and won't be running it in the future. TCO estimates for secretarial pools don't tell the story for corporate computing. Why take Fortune so seriously Ken? You can't believe everything you read just because it is published in a magazine.