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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (12325)	11/19/1998 12:07:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Respond to of 74651

>there are 2 competing technologies at Oracle - one is 8i as you mentioned and the other is an application server Yes, and to be clear, the app server uses Java (JInitiator) to interface the browser to the application (written in Developer) running on the app server.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (12325)	11/19/1998 12:22:00 PM
From: paul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

Michelle - not sure i understand how you are positioning Java relative to Sun's position as an enterprise provider of systems which they clearly are and have been since the inception of the company - by any similar measure Dell is not a provider on par with Sun. In fact they address two different markets - i think your comparison is more suited to say Dell vs. Compaq since your focusing more on Dell's distribution and manufacturing capability vs. their technology - something I agree is clearly superior to their competitors. Dell certainly provides PC's and file and print servers ala novell or NT and they have the best shot of growing their business in the low end applications business but Sun provides Mainframe class servers up to 256 processors, HPC workstations, and a range of SMP servers from 2 -64 processors - just as importantly they provide an operating System - Solaris that can take advantage of these processors and stay up without rebooting - for example last time i counted there were 55 documented procedures for maintaining NT 4 which required a reboot - could you imagine Amazon.com rebooting there servers simply to load or update software? how about unplanned downtime - i.e - Server crashes, NT doesnt have any remote manageability so if the servers go down the sysadmin has to be physically next to the machine to administer it - a Sun (or any Unix server) can be administered via a rlogin from anywhere in the world - a clear example of NT's PC background vs. Unix's Networked DNA. Dell needs a better OS if they want to compete with Sun and of course a 64-bit chip architecture - they wont get one until Merced in the year 2001 (if there are no more delays) and Intel is already admitting that Merced is not a RISC killer but a x/86 compatible 64 bit implementation - what a revesal from Intel's original claims! If RISC architecture stayed the same over the next 3 years it would still outperform Merced and SPARC (Sun), Alpha(digital), PowerPC(IBM) are heading for ghz speeds. There is a big trend away from distributing point solutions on NT at F1000 shops and consolidating them onto larger scalable unix or s/390 systems. Obviously one of the problems is that the administration costs are huge for managing a large number of NT servers which typically provide 1 service and are inherently unreliable.For example a customer of mine is consolidating over 14 servers running Lotus Notes on NT onto a Sun Ultra 450. Also the market for Sun machines isnt the "high-end" graveyard - everyone is demanding a greater level of availability and reliability due to e-commerce and the Internet. Customers are also handling much more massive amounts of data than ever before - this is only going to increase - remember when 1 Terabyte Data Warehouses were considered VLDB's? - Its not uncommon for midsized businesses to generate this amount of data anymore. Dell and Sun can both do well in this environment - which they are - Sun's stock price is at an all time high as well as Dell. Digital/Compaq HP, Tandem, Sequent, NCR, Siemens, Bull are all struggling thanks to Sun and in some sense IBM. Dell is taking a chunk out of many of these vendors on the pc side. At some point it may be Dell vs. Sun but Dell would have to have a much more enterprise class OS maybe NT 7 or 8??? as well as much more RAS capabilities in their hardware as well as a services organization that can provide mission-critical support. as far as Java which originated for interactive television which as we now know was ahem a technology before its time it was in the right spot at the right time as the internet was becoming the low cost, universal medium for distributing data and applications which were really in the infancy of. Java doesnt play a huge role in Sun's traditional role as a provider of enterprise systems but it makes huge sense for Sun as a software, embedded and consumer applicance manufacturer.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (12325)	11/19/1998 1:22:00 PM
From: Mike Milde	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

<< I can tell you that Sun is such a manufacturing pig that there is no way they will be competitive against Dell on any server Dell sells. Of course this leaves the high end for Sun, true, nobody says Dell will win there. But Sun had a 5 year lead in trying to figure out how to create a streamlined facility and cant deliver. >> DELL makes PCs. DELL's customers are almost entirely different than Sun's. Sun sells higher performance hardware. I'm also not sure what you mean by "Sun can't deliver". Sun has been growing revenues and earnings extremely fast over the last few years, and it is due to hardware sales, not Java. Sun has also been grabbing market share in the UNIX world. The Java win is VERY important to Sun. It won't affect earnings any time soon, but it does suddenly give Java almost unstoppable momentum. And developers love Java. Don't underestimate how important that is. I've found that whatever developers love is what ultimately goes. The growing acceptance of Linux is one good example. Marketing by a large corporation didn't put Linux where it is today. Mike