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Technology Stocks : Microsoft - The Evil empire -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul who wrote (519)	12/29/1997 9:05:00 AM
From: Robert Winchell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1600

NT is 4 times less than a sun workstation with equal performance? Depends what you are talking about. NT is an OS and a Sun workstation is hardware and an OS. Can you equal the performance of a Sun workstation with an NT box, for less money? Absolutely. Are there high-end Sun workstations which NT boxes can't touch? There are, for now. Universities typically get very favorable pricing and they pay for higher performance. Universities buy Sun workstations because most faculty are UNIX freaks and are terrified by anything else. The know UNIX, have worked with UNIX since "the beginning", so why would they buy anything else? It has very little to do with price/performance. Sun doesnt need workstations to grow and it is releaseing a $5,000 line of technical workstations in January to keep parity with Wintel. who knows - maybe the DOJ will sue Sun and give them additional publicity. Why would they do this? Given the choice between a $5k Wintel machine and a $5k Sun machine, why would anyone buy the Sun box? This sounds like a loss leader for Sun.

To: paul who wrote (519)	12/29/1997 9:17:00 PM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1600

I called Sun because one of their alleged engineers claimed that NT had a scaling inefficiciency due to the necessity of software mechanisms like process locks necessary to garantee data and process integrity where the equivalent wasn't necessary under Solaris. In order to gain the similar functionality this engineer claimed it was necessary to write OS software patches and I explained that Solaris source wasn't available to me in order to confirm or deny whether this claim was accurate or whether there were other issues. Then I got various input from engineers and others stating it was readily available and they would check this out and get back to me. They never did. I stated that it would be dumb to release OS source to the public in that you'd have a new Tower of Babel that has already evolved wrt UNIX and its flavors. On my own as a pro developer I did discover that this engineer failed to mention that increased speed has a trade-off in increased demands for overhead. In particular, higher demnads for RAM. Bottom line: NT is slower and less stable but much cheaper. Fact of life: Cheaper always beats better, because cheaper can be cheaply improved but better is locked into fat indolent inefficient dinosaurs that have cut sweetheart deals with buyers who are indifferent to price. Since the government has never been able to define monopoly, nor the economists, obviously the word is ambiguous. What everyone seems to agree on is that it means dominance in a market. A dominance that creates inefficiencies solely for the benefit of the monopolizer. Now you can't say that about Sun, can you. 4 times. I have clients that don't want to pay 5G's for what I do hardware wise for 1G. I'm near Silicon Valley so that makes a difference but not wrt Sun. I'm looking at prices in "Expressline". These prices are so ridiculous I can't see how they make sales unless they have a captured market that is precluded from dealing with competitive alternatives. The difference in performance may be 10%. The companies I write for just aren't interested in paying for this marginal difference. Sun's new 5g workstation that won't even keep up with INTC's latest chip line at 1/3 the cost. You obviously have not dealt with buying these machines. This blindness has been going on for years, maybe 7 long years. Eventually, SUNW will have to change and compete like CPQ did. Before that happens, SUNW is going to take a break, an ORCL break.