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

To: QwikSand who wrote (54612)	6/16/2003 8:52:24 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Hi Qwik, Maybe it would rankle the James Goslings etal., but so what? They don't have to like it. The company has to make money, not give away software. These 'pet moonlighting projects' may well be the reason shareware contains so much tested code. It may be the reason IBM is now being sued. Everyone who has been in the biz knows that piracy has always been a part of software development. Even patents are violated indiscriminately. So much theft takes place that it has become an 'acceptable practice'. Ok, so the companies figure that they might as well play along. The conventional wisdom was to turn the software idea into a 'mindshare' gain as part of the marketing push. Once the user got used to using this brilliant piece of code that was freely distributed, they would just love the licensed product even more & pay for it. So it was an 'introductory offer' and a 'loss leader' for the company. MSFT wisely decided to protect their IP with vigorous enforcement of outright pirates and by designing proprietary code. No Bill Gates didn't really subscribe to the shareware world and hence gained the disdain of software gurus everywhere. He cried all the way to the bank, as Liberace once said. For computer companies like Sun, the marketing ploy took the shape of "let the software sell the hardware, we make 50% on hardware so we can give away the software". My point is simply this: if the industry needed a way to hook consumers onto the computer bandwagon, shareware was a good way to do it. Now, the biz is established. Users don't need convincing. However, one unfortunate holdover from the shareware mentality is this: consumers are used to getting lots of software for free and they expect it. Sun owns Java. Java is a bonfide hit. Sun needs to build its popularity into its licensing scheme. Are you familiar with the music biz?? The way publishers collect royalties from jukeboxes is to estimate their usage based on the size of the venue and charge a fee based thereupon. Sun needs to figure out how to charge big bux for Java applets that are running everywhere around the world. Giving the software away is just plain stupid. You can tell Jim I said so.