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

To: Kashish King who wrote (5631)	11/15/1997 12:39:00 PM
From: Homer	Respond to of 64865

Sorry, just felt with the ISO vote in the news this may be of someone's intrest.

To: Kashish King who wrote (5631)	11/15/1997 12:48:00 PM
From: Homer	Respond to of 64865

"people will move to an integrated Web browser and operating system based on Java." George Colony, the CEO at Forrester Research. Barron's Online -- November 17, 1997 For All the Company-Orchestrated Hoopla, Odds Are Long on a Recovery at Apple Computer Forrester, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, makes money from signing on corporate subscribers to its periodic reports predicting the direction of computers, the Internet and all things digital. Forrester is in the business of providing opinions. And no one at that company -- or almost anyplace else in the tech sector -- has more of them than Colony. We caught up with him over breakfast at the recent American Electronics Association investment conference in San Diego, and he was his usual opinionated self. For instance, Larry Ellison will be glad to hear, Colony has become an enthusiastic advocate of Java and network computers. Colony doesn't necessarily expect the NC to replace personal computers, but he nonetheless contends that they will grow in popularity, and that it won't be good for Microsoft. "About 50% of their business is Microsoft Office," he says. "The current model works if each version of the software is really better than the last, and people buy the upgrade. But Word 7.0 is only minimally better than 6.0; people feel less need to change to the new version. The market is becoming satiated. The cycle is lengthening out, and that's going to hurt them." On the subject of operating systems, Colony theorizes that Windows 98, scheduled to be introduced some time next year as the successor to Windows 95, will be the last upgrade to Windows. After that, he figures, people will move to an integrated Web browser and operating system based on Java. Colony, as it happens, has no complaints with the way Microsoft and Intel have handled their monopoly control over the PC industry. "Most monopolists raise prices and lower quality," he says. "That's not been the case with Intel-prices have come down, and it's been good stuff. The only way the computer business has been able move forward historically is when there are standards wrought by monopolies. It gives people the confidence to take chances and build applications." In the case of Java, he says, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNeally will need to succeed in his efforts to be the industry's new dictator. "It's the right thing to do," Colony says. "It's the only way the thing lifts off the ground. The alternative is what happened to Unix," which split into a zillion different incompatible varieties, slowing its adoption. Copyright c 1997 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.