Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: tom jones who wrote (8450)	3/21/1998 8:18:00 PM
From: Stewart Whitman	Respond to of 64865

To all: Having more than a few years experience in the embedded systems market, here's some items that I'd like to point out regarding the HP announcement: 1. HP has built a Java package for embedded systems (presumably including a modified JVM). No big deal - a lot of other embedded OS vendors have built Java-compatible or modified Java systems for the embedded systems: ISI (pERC): isi.com Wind River: prnewswire.com to name just a few. No reason to be too critical of HP or the other vendors. The JVM Sun was producing was just not suited for embedded system purposes (lots of problems solved and lots of opportunities for other companies). In fact, the whole embedded market is extremely fragmented. Realistically, how is any one vendor going to provide support for all the different CPUs, compilation environments, real-time OS's, dramatically differing requirements, etc. How silly of the industry analysts not to expect fragmentation in this area. 2. I don't think HP has said they were going to deliver Microsoft's "revolutionary" Windows-based packages or deviate from the Java library specification (e.g. intentionally replace certain support). In fact, I doubt they'll ever package them separately. My reasoning: there's no real reason to - the changes Microsoft made only work on Window-based OS's anyway. 3. In any event, if Microsoft does decide to repackage/modify classes, etc. they face at least similar problems in claiming Java compatibility. You just can't modify core stuff in a language and claim its compatible (whether the court sees it this way is another matter). Hey, just wait 'till ISO adopts a standard that Microsoft doesn't comply with (well, maybe that'll be a few years off). 4. A stripped down JVM is a pretty darn trivial thing to write. Efficiency is a little more difficult. Security is very difficult. Duplicating class libraries is a lot more difficult - but I would guess that HP hasn't done this anyway. What I'm trying to say is that this is not a great technical breakthrough on the part of HP. Other people have done (and if Microsoft has to pay royalties to HP on Windows CE, they'll probably cut out HP eventually) and will continue to do it. Sun has published the specifications for all to follow. 5. HP doesn't really have a large position in the embedded system market anyway. Sure they sell emulators, logic analyzers, and build some cross-compilation environments (and yes they have their own devices - printers, etc.), but they are no where near being a dominate player. So whoppee, HP has a product with no very clear distribution channel (no surprise there for HP - always good products, seldom clear marketing direction or good support). Sun's direction - Diba, Chorus (even though Chorus is probably a management nightmare), working with industry groups to set up APIs, Motorola partnership (the key player in embedded) - pretty clear direction that should come together at some time to give it part of the market (not all of it - like I said, it's doubtful that anyone is going to take everything in this market in the near future). So excuse me if I laugh in Wall Street's general direction when I see them selling off Sun because of HP's announcement. Thank you, I'll go back to lurking now. Stew