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

To: DownSouth who wrote (5661)	11/16/1997 3:50:00 PM
From: Ken Sullivan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

>No disrespect [for Scott McNealy] intended, but those skills are good when you are the gorilla in the market, but they will do you no good if your marketshare begins to seriously erode. Example, Dr. An Wang. A great engineer, but his market fell out from under him and he had no idea how to respond... Down South, Please consider that both Scott McNealy and the late Dr. Wang placed the emphasis on the same word, INNOVATION. The difference was An Wang thought ONLY of HIS OWN innovative ideas while Scott McNealy (Sun) strives to enable the cumulative innovation of the marketplace; and then tries to take advantage of it. The whole point of a single development environment (language, VM and APIs) that can run on any hardware platform is to enable a higher rate of innovation. When more innovation reaches increasingly cost conscious end users - who have rapidly changing business needs - through more applications then Sun will be man o'the mountain, and Scott McNealy's "consistently belligerant" behavior will put him on the cover of Time magazine as "Person of the Year" (I predict 2000.) My money is on Sun. ken

To: DownSouth who wrote (5661)	11/16/1997 8:28:00 PM
From: Krishna A. Ubrani	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Two points - one, Sun will be entering the appliance market significantly. Two, the infrastructure for NC's is being developed jointly with other companies and is happening very fast.

To: DownSouth who wrote (5661)	11/17/1997 5:39:00 AM
From: Holger Johannsen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

>The conclusion among corporate/government decision makers is not so clear as you seem to think. Many have already decided that NT is a "comparable" OS.< I'm sorry, but I can't concur with that. NT is not comparable when it comes to scalability and reliability. I know that from our regional computing center at the University. They run all kinds of machines (SGI, IBM, SUN) and decided to try a Wintel server. Naturally they started out with NT and found it to be crashing many times. This did drive the costs of ownership up compared to the UNIX machines. After a couple of months they finally gave up and used a different OS which is very popular in Germany compared to the US: OS/2 Warp 4. It is still the main OS among major banks in Germany because they do rely heavily on a reliable OS. And despite all those applications for NT there are still many programmers out there who are willing to support applications for "exotic" OSs as long as customers demand them. I know that my personal experience might prove wrong in other parts of the world and I should not draw conclusions from it but that's the reason for being on this board and I will surely reevaluate my opinion if people come up with new facts. >It isn't difficult, but there are three problems: 1) cost of producing full-blown PCs is falling dramatically. Remember when one of the attractions to an NC was that it would be <$1000? Well, so did costs for the components of an NC fall. The price of an NC should be dramatically below $500 when mass production kicks in. I will certainly change my mind about the NC if the companies are not able to come up with such a low price. >2) there is no significant demand This is due to a insignificant supply at a reasonable price. There are NCs out there from X-Terminal makers. The German magazine c't heise.de did test some of those NCs and found them to be very useful. Nevertheless the prices were outrageously high compared to PCs. Naturally there won't be any demand at those prices. >3) the infrastructure to support all of the functions that the NC does not do is not in place Can you explain this? >Well, I feel kinda bad being the devil's advocate here in the group. Don't feel bad about it. It's always good to hear the other side of the story and don't get too exuberant on a certain stock. I always try to think of reasons not to invest in a certain company. Sun does have some weak spots and that's IMO why it does not trade at a higher PE. Holger