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

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (48361)	4/17/2002 4:35:22 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

OK, since you guys brought this subject up, and even though part of it is OT, I'll indulge myself. I'll try to be terse but I seldom succeed. I bought my niece an 800Mhz G4 iMac the other day. She's 14 years old, it's a slightly early gift for graduation from middle school. After I went over to my brother's house to set it up, I came away with 2 impressions and a question, to which I still don't have the answer. The question is on-topic for this thread. The two impressions belong on the MSFT thread, but I never like to post there, especially since their most intellectually powerful regular, johnd, stopped coming around. Impression 1: This iMac blows away any Wintel desktop machine running any Intel processor and any MSFT OS so hard that it's not even a contest. Not just for 14-year-old girls, but for anyone. There's simply no discussion to be had on the subject except price, and I'm not sure how that really stacks up when you add in the quality of bundled software and the dollar value of the ease-of-use. The question about "which computer should I buy" that many of us on this thread have gotten over the years, will never again elicit a pause from me. I could go on at great length but I will restrain myself except to say that in addition to bundling an office suite that would suffice for 98% of corporate workers in the world, this thing lets you edit and BURN a video DVD using simple, intuitive, bundled applications that a 14-year old has no trouble with. A comparison between this machine and a box running Windows XP (about which I consider myself knowledgeable) or anything else Microsoft has ever produced, is a rigorously vacuous exercise. Impression 2: The G4 iMac hammers home afresh a tired old point: One transgression that Microsoft has committed by exploiting its monopoly, but of which it hasn't been explicitly accused in court, is a particularly sad one: lowering the bar on software quality, conditioning desktop PC users to believe that garbage is good enough. How do you put a dollar figure on that? Question: (Relevant to SUNW) The iMac G4 is a Unix box. To repeat: history's most fun and usable desktop PC is a Unix box. It's not running an MS-equivalent garbage-toy-OS like MacOS 9, it's a Unix box. So why didn't Sun build it first? Unix's arrogant two-letter-acronyms and nightmare administrative arcana are totally buried in the iMac, but it's all actually quite available if you really want to see it. True, this is a Steve Jobs thing. And true, Sun's original constituency was the engineering workstation user who insisted on putting his hands in the guts of the thing and yada yada yada. Nonetheless, Sun has been paying lip service to useability for a decade or more, as it continued to hop from one "open" GUI to another, all the while scrolling up yards of witless driver start-up messages at boot time. Try to tell me that Sun, with all its vaunted brainpower, couldn't have come up with one of these a long time ago. --QS