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

To: Keith Hankin who wrote (6742)	1/14/1998 1:18:00 AM
From: Chung Yang	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

There is a big difference between home desktop and engineering and science workstations. While SUN has no prescense in the home market, it dominates in the engineering/science and has a big chunk of the finance market. This is because a majority of power hungry/mission critical application is written for UNIX platforms. There are currently no equivalent software in the PC/NT market. However many major engineering and science software vendor are porting their applications to PCs. Darwin was developed for halting this trend. Now that many mechanical engineering and chip design as well as financial houses will be able to purchase UNIX machines at PC prices without making further investment in software. Switching to another platform is often painful for users/IS administrators because of unpredictability of new software/ hardware solutions. Now that the cost advantage of PCs no longer exist, many of these firms will choose to stick with SUN. Another thing to think about many of these firms do have the need for big powerful massive server class machines. By sticking with the Sun Darwin boxes, they can use the same software from entry level machines all the way up to massive 64 way servers. That is a pretty big advantage. True, you don't have Word97 with Solaris, but you don't have Cadence Silicon Ensemble with WinNT either. On the other hand, if you purchase a PC card for the Darwin boxes you can use WinNT apps on the fly. - Chung >>> The Darwin line looks good. But I have a serious question for this thread: Isn't it too late to try to win the desktop when PCs have already won out here? Sure, this introduction may help stem the tide of Sun's existing base from defecting, but I don't see many choosing Solaris over Win95/NT. Any price/performance gains are quickly wiped out by the software (hardware drivers and applications) for the PC. Moreover, Sun has not been able to foster anything near the clone market for its line of computers, so there will not be much if any competition on the hardware side. Or am I missing something? Please enlighten me. <<<<