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

To: Kal who wrote (9488)	5/3/1998 7:35:00 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Kal: I've posted here to another that I find the article referenced, by Nicholas Petreley, to be a sloppy piece of writing. Since I don't get paid for my musings on SI, I can get away with it. But a paid 'professional'? Anyways, I still haven't changed my opinion. Mr. Petreley appears to have lots of opinions. He's executive editor of NC World Magazine. I guess that explains his biases. In 1995 he was also a big proponent of OpenDoc (OpenWhat you say?). I guess those on this thread would say that OpenDoc is yet another example of 'a terrific technology killed by Microsoft'. Well, no I say! OpenDoc and other such technologies are being killed by lack of interest by many of the worlds developers and ISV's who appear to have decided that Microsoft is an easier way to success. Microsoft didn't put any guns to any heads to get all these developers over. They executed a brilliant marketing strategy that caused the development community to want to move over. My point all along is that if you make it easy for a platform to have a rich set of applications, that platform will survive and thrive. Examples in recent history - neXt, by all accounts terrific desktop OS, good object based development platform. If there are any neXt based apps still around, they are few and far between, and likely all in the financial market (competing these days with NT Workstation based apps and/or OS/2). neXt failed to capture the hearts and pocketbooks of enough developers. And now its not next, it is gone. - Apple, who had the creme de la creme of apps and attention of developers for a long time, and then lost the focus (and almost the company). future still being written. Primary reason for failure? Windows market grew much faster than the Mac because the hardware at least was Open. Everyone makes money. Nope, they pursued an isolationist strategy and paid the price. - Novell, I'm not saying they are dead yet, but look at all the application vendors that once, sort of, supported the NLM programming model. As soon as NT was stable enough, those vendors ran away in droves from the NLM platform. - A string of UNIX variants, lets use DG as a good example. Data General had a technologically superior UNIX long before Solaris even became stable. High end SMP support before Sybase could even effectively use a second processor (and that, unbelievably, wasn't all that long ago). DG was one of the very first vendors to proclaim that UNIX was "the" commercial grade operating system and led the market for a while. But they didn't prosper as well as other UNIX vendors because they couldn't maintain mind share of the worlds enterprise (and other) UNIX software vendors. They grew tired of having multiple flavors of their products for each UNIX. Woe be a UNIX vendor where they are listed as Tier 2 platform, or worse, by a hot app vendor. It is no wonder that, after almost 20 years, we are finally seeing the UNIX vendors coalese around just a few major variants. My point, again, is: He who has the most developer support for an application platform wins. I must admit that I thought, initially, that Java was a brilliant move by SUN, but I'm not so sure now that it is panning out. And I fail to see how any one hardware vendor will benefit from Java, because in order for Java to be successful, it can not follow the path of UNIX over the past 20 years. Regards Michael PS: I would be curious to know what type of application / requirement you have.