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

To: E_K_S who wrote (8371)	3/17/1998 5:55:00 AM
From: Loft Guy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

I am a long time lurker of this group. I own some SUNW and would like to offer my views on some trends. I have had a sun workstation on my desk for probably 10 years now (and no it is not still a sun 3/50). The trend I see at work is far fewer purchases of desktop workstations since even older sparc 10s work well. We are now buying servers for major tasks and deployed applications than we ever did before since basically all of the mainframe applications have been ported to unix. We are going to buy some new servers to run solaris 2.6 since Sun refuses to certify Sunos 4.1.4 as Y2K. Our company has declared MS Office as standard programs so everyone with a workstation is also supposed to have a PC. Some groups will probably end up running X displays on their desktop PC with Sun servers running the applications. We have a fair number of win NT machines, but they are all servers for win95 and have not replaced any sun servers. While sun servers could generally replace the win NT servers, it was decided that Win NT has better tools for figuring out problems with win95 clients. Anyway, if this is the common trend then Win NT is growing as a better server for win95 lans than a win95 machine. Sun has a static market for workstations and a growing market for servers. As the money is in the servers then I think this is a good trend for Sun. I also have solaris 2.6 X86 and win95 installed on my PC. From using it, I do not think Sun actually intends to compete as a dual operating system. Sun's boot commander is probably the worst that exists and the install requires going back and reinstalling windows. Linux installs much easier and nicer. Also, I think that Sun is not making a serious effort to sell desktop machines to a wider audience. MSFT has all of these wizard programs that makes it easy to do common stuff. I set up PPP on both solaris 2.6 and win95. The solaris 2.6 setup required correctly making entries into a half dozen files while for win95 I just had to fill in entries on that control panel. If Sun really wanted to compete on number of workstations sold then they would sell solaris x86 for $100 to pick up lots of current linux users, OEM some win95 emulations package (so unix desktops can run common win95 applications) and have a staff writing wizards as fast as they can. I am amazed that Sun doesn't even have a install/config wizards promotion where they give goodies to people who have written their own wizards and will give Sun a license to distribute it.