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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (7476)	1/30/1998 3:20:00 PM
From: batskinner	Respond to of 64865

At last count, there are some 12,000 applications programs written to run on Solaris. That's quite a few. Additionally, Solaris runs Windows applications as well via WABI. 12,000 is a big number. However, in the desktop applications area, I have to admit (not that I like to) that NT probably has a wider selection. For more demanding engineering, database, financial, etc. type applications, I have no doubt that applications for Solaris are widely available (at least in engineering this is true). As for WABI, the following is directly from Sun's web site: sun.com While the WabiTM technology provides an office suite solution, it does not provide 100 percent compatibility, which is an increasing customer requirement. Today, other alternatives to PC compatibity with SolarisTM exist. From a longer-term perspective, office productivity applications will utilize the JavaTM technology. Sun has decided to demphasize its investment in the Wabi technology and no longer co-packages Wabi with Solaris. I don't consider WABI to be a very good solution. I've used WABI before. It worked reasonably well but was somewhat slow. And from what I read above, its days are numbered. Of course, Java is supposed to be the reason that WABI will no longer be needed in the future. Then we'll have desktop (office suite) applications written in Java. But as yet, this has not happened to any substantial degree. There are other solutions such as SoftWindows95 but I have not tried them so I don't know how well they work. How many applications are written for the PC? Are you serious? Maybe I don't understand the question. Are you asking how many applications of some particular type are written for the PC? Again, in the arena of very demanding applications (business, engineering, medicine, etc.) I'd say Solaris beats PCs. But if you're asking how many PC applications there are in general, the answer has to be thousands. Don't get me wrong; I think Sun will do very well in the future. I just think that they could capture the low end market much more effectively if there were better desktop applications available. If I could run a good office suite under Solaris on a Darwin for $3k to $4k, it'd be a no brainer as to whether to go this route or with NT.