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

To: Babu Arunachalam who wrote (9780)	5/9/1998 12:58:00 PM
From: Bob Drzyzgula	Respond to of 64865

A very interesting story, for being published on ZD. Thanks for posting the link. I'd just like to add a couple of comments... > Even Microsoft adherents were caught by surprise, when Java, > itself overhyped in early years, actually caught on. But competitive > business pressures pushed information systems managers who had been > inclined to wait and see what Microsoft would do to switch gears > and start solving problems with the best technology immediately > available. Technologies that in 1999 had seemed to have only a > toehold against Microsoft's dominance blossomed in 2000, 2001 > and 2002. Not only Java tools, applications and servlets but > also connectivity software based on the Object Management Group's > Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) seemed to form a > natural fit around the proliferation of technologies based on Java > Development Kit 2.07. An interesting note here: Many current open source projects are being coded to the CORBA standard. One of the most visible projects, the GNOME desktop (http://www.gnome.org) is very overt in using CORBA as an underlying object model for the desktop, much like MS uses COM/OLE/ActiveX. There seems to be enough concensus on CORBA for it to go somewhere on a cross-platform basis. > Hardware vendors, hard-pressed to find profits in sub-$1,000 PCs, > began to exploit the freeware phenomenon that had created the Apache > Web server as an Internet-based development project and offer a > free operating system -- Linux -- that allowed them to shave prices > further. Supported mainly by volunteers posting information to Web > sites, Linux grew from 5 million users in 1998 to 27 million five > years later. A development that tipped the balance in 1998 was the > discovery that the U.S. Postal Service was using 900 Linux-based > systems around the country to sort mail.<P> FYI, the Post Office thing is real. Take a look at members.aa.net > Just as Sun Microsystems Inc. was able to maintain healthy margins > in the Unix workstation space by selling hardware optimized for > Sun's operating system and microprocessor, PC makers were able to > beef up bottom lines by selling hardware designed to exploit an > operating system designed for a specific set of users -- a scenario > that Tarter predicted would occur if Microsoft's power over original > equipment manufacturers was capped.<P> This, clearly, is what Corel Computer is up to. Whistle communications, whistle.com makes a product called the "InterJet", which runs FreeBSD, and is being sold as a turn-key internet connectivity solution for small offices. Buy one, get a domain name, plug it in, turn it on and your company has a full-service firewall, web server, email router, etc. Another link of interest is at O'Reilly and Associates, wherein they speak to the growing hardware-independance of Linux: linux.oreilly.com --Bob