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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (9455)	5/1/1998 5:18:00 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Cheryl, I never said anything remotely like your following... Where is it documented that NT outperforms Solaris? I'd like to see it. Right now NT's calling card is it's support for MSFT applications & price. Since SUNW's announcement of its low-end workgroup servers & the Ultra-5 & 10 workstations, price is no longer an issue. But since you brought it up, I agree with you and you point out correctly that application support is a key issue. SO I'll change my train of thought for a second. It [Solaris] out-muscles NT in speed, throughput, scalability, and reliablity. SUNW low-end servers outperform anything CPQ or DELL has come up with. That, my friend, is superior technology and execution If we are talking low end servers or desktops, then I think its clear that SUNW isn't a leader in those markets, except where UNIX is the entrenched OS of majority. It's hardly worth comparing DELL or CPQ, who I am sure sell 90% NT/non-UNIX vs 10% UNIX. Their markets are supported by applications (and file systems) that run primarily on NT. Note that performance isn't an issue here or that whole market would be on Alpha! If raw specs mean that the plan was executed perfectly, then I'd have to say that you can win a battle and lose a war. On any platform it is applications, applications, applications that make or break the platform. It appears that on the desktop and low-end server market that MSFT may be leading here. understatement intended. However, if we are talking 7*24, fault tolerant, highly available, managable, many processors, very large user counts, high I/O, clustering, NUMA, etc, then I agree, WINTEL isn't there yet. (And it is interesting to note that very little of the above technology depends on Java's existance at all). I also agree with you that what we are talking about is "equipment". Larger shops don't much care about all these debates, and that is partly because the application vendors dictate the platform support. For example, here's a high-availabilty environment. Healthcare. Just try and run Meditech (a predominant healthcare application)on a SUN. You can't. Only Data General and to a very small degree DEC are supported by the app. (And it isn't important to my point that new releases are on NT) What is interesting is that several of the other large healthcare application ISV's that sell to acute care hospitals and HMO's are in fact developing and shipping their new apps on NT. I am aware of one where the only place that a SUNW box would fit in the solution is as an archive repository. Now its equally true that there are apps written for SUN that don't run on DG or HP. I think NT is making inroads well beyond file and print services. I'm not saying that it can equal Sun or HP or DG or most grown-up unix varients. But an informal poll of developers that I know building applications across a wide variety of industries indicates to me clearly that there's a heck of a lot of NT based app development going on. Bunch of Java too, but not nearly as much. Re McNeally acting like a child - perhaps most don't care; but then again, a high proportion of UNIX career folks and devotees probably would encourage him. I personally think it lesses his credibility. But, with Jobs and Ellison's egos to keep up with, I guess he has to work at it. Must be a California thang. Later