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

To: Bob Drzyzgula who wrote (9737)	5/8/1998 12:09:00 AM
From: cAPSLOCK	Respond to of 64865

Bravo. What vision. I heard an interview recently on my public radio station here in Dallas with the man who is responsible for GNU, or starting it, Richard Stallman. Quite interesting. It is a radical philosophy. Although I have used many many many products that fall under the GNU GPL (haven't we all?), I never understood the almost religious significance of the project until I heard this interview. The topics you touch on almost ring of some sort of new world order (please remove any connotations :) for information in what is indeed the information age. Will this all affect microsoft?? I believe it already has. Will it continue to suprize us?? Who knows. Thanks for your post. James

To: Bob Drzyzgula who wrote (9737)	5/8/1998 12:50:00 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Bob, I appreciate your very long and thoughtful response. I don't agree with all of it, but I appreciate someone making me think on this thread for a change! One of the few I have printed out... Maybe I've missed something with respect to Linux because I've been surrounded by workstations and big iron UNIX for a while. Your article reminds me of the days when I played with publically available software for radio transmission of digital packet data. It was good fun. Never made money from it, but like you say, if I didn't like something I could fix the source. I think the "make money" component is a big issue however, both for investors and business like. As a computer for kids in school, this would offer unprecedented functionality for such a price. Since kids love to tinker with things like this, it could result in a signficant expansion in the number of people who learn how to program on a non-Microsoft-based platform If by kids you mean older secondary and post secondary level, I think you have a point, in that the cheapness of the platform makes it accessible (how I got my start in this business long ago actually, was accessibility to a computer) -- but I think it doesn't meet the vocational criteria of being a direction that is know to generate jobs yet. Today its very hard to find a good VB or C++ or Java programmer, available, at a decent rate... (we use the former two by 10 to 1 proportion right now). If they can make it a solid, stable platform for Word Perfect, I could also see law offices using it. Word Perfect on Windows is OK, but one does get rather tired of the crashes. It isn't possible right now to tell how much of this is because MS put Word Perfect killer code in their OS and how much is because Corel's code is just plain buggy. This platform could help to answer that question I see first hand in our document management practice, and specifically in the legal industry, how poorly Corel has acted with Word Perfect. Actually it has been going on since Novell acquired them. Large law firms all over the place (not all, but a lot) moved to MS Word over the past few years because of WP stability problems. WP seems to be one of the buggiest Windows applications around and even recently it is still a big problem. I don't think we can blame that on Microsoft (is there a kill WP code branch in the OS? am I being too pollyanna-ish to not believe that?). I can point to one firm that has stayed on WP and has been battling problems with WP for half a year. Corel is being pretty helpful in that they put people on the problem, but still, half a year? Once upon a time, companies like Novell and Corel thought that what it would take to defeat Microsoft was another Microsoft, with a soup-to-nuts portfolio of operating systems and/or applications for the PC platform. What Sun knows is that Microsoft owns the PC platform and will garrote anyone who tries to take it from them, which is in and of itself a good enough reason for them to stay away from building an X86-based machine. Novell and Corel have learned that lesson the hard way. In the rest of your article you suggest that writing to other platforms is an answer since Microsoft has dominated the x86 personal computer market. I don't agree that writing to other platforms will be more useful in competition. That divides up the development community more. Writing to commodity platforms is a sure way to success for most developers. So Intel is a commodity. Perhaps if the write once, run everywhere goal becomes a reality there can be more than one commodity platform. At least for "personal" applications. Should Microsoft's OS and Applications divisions be split to permit fairness in competition? Perhaps that would help. I'll be back later after I think about this some more.