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

To: Dan Guinan who wrote (9049)	4/14/1998 9:25:00 AM
From: Scott McPeely	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Perhaps this thread needs a bucket of cold water thrown over their heads in order to shake the theory that Sun is spending money on Java for the sake of world harmony. I found a link that describes Sun's motives pretty well: world.std.com ... "Well and good. A technically-modern language has been created and specified and seems to be gaining credibility. But what does Sun gain out of all this? Is it just corporate philanthropy and altruism to create this marvelous new language and distribute it widely? Not hardly. Sun expects to make big money off of this. (Their official answers can be found here. But I don't think they're giving the whole story, as will become apparent.) But where is the hot product? From whence does the torrent of money flow? Selling compilers? Nope, Sun isn't going to dominate that area. Too many big names who are better known that Sun for developing compilers are already creating Java compiler packages. Sun itself has a set of development tools, but they're relatively primitive and Sun gives them away. Ah, but all of those other companies must license Java, and Sun will pull in the bucks on license fees, right? No, the license fees are actually pretty small, and nothing like high enough to pay for all of this. The real gold-mine lies somewhere else entirely. But to understand where, we'll need to change subjects. We'll get back to Sun and Java in a while. ... Which brings us back to Sun, finally, and Java. Sun is now attempting to break this hammerlock on the platform market, but they're using an approach which has not been tried before. In all the previous attempts to shift the market, the approach was to shift the users first. Give the users a new and vastly better API while retaining all the ones they currently use; wait until a large installed base of the new API existed, then try to move the developers to the new API. Sun is approaching it from the opposite side: Shift the developers first. Present them with the ability to develop their programs for all existing platforms plus new ones at little increased cost through use of a portable API, use this to create a large body of applications which are not locked into any specific platform, then use that to move users off of the platforms they currently use. And Sun will be there, ready to go, with platforms to sell using both software and hardware developed by Sun -- ready to cash in. That is why Sun is doing all of this; that is the economic incentive that makes this all worthwhile to them. The potential payoff is measured in billions of dollars. The goal is nothing less than to completely dislodge the entire industry off of Microsoft/Intel/PC entirely, and (Sun hopes) onto platforms for which Sun is the primary source. The management at Sun are not fools; they know they can't do this alone. They're not going to be a sole-source here, because the market won't succeed if there's only one source of platforms. (All previous attempts at sole-source platforms except one are now dead, and the prospects for that one are looking increasingly grim.) But they'd rather have a big piece of the new market they are trying to establish, than what they have now, which is no piece at all of the PC market. They have everything to gain and little to lose. The investment is not that great and the potential payoff is colossal. IBM failed in its attempt to make OS/2 dislodge Windows the way that Windows had previously dislodged DOS, and OS/2 is now on the outside looking in. But IBM still wants into this market. IBM has thus allied itself with Sun on the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Since they don't seem to be able to dislodge Microsoft any other way, they've committed considerable resources to this new approach. But this alliance must be an uneasy one, because if they do succeed in breaking the Microsoft hammerlock, suddenly Sun and IBM will be in direct competition - and they both know it. ... The threat lies not in Java as such, but in portable Java. If the developers begin to write their applications such that they become portable, so that while they will run on WIN32 they don't require it, then this presents the awful prospect (from Microsoft's point of view) of creating a large pool of developers and products which users can follow elsewhere, off of Microsoft's platforms. Certainly this is exactly what Sun hopes will happen." ********************* Shucks, and here I thought Sun's motive was to end all that is evil in the world.