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To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (850)	12/1/1998 7:06:00 PM
From: Robert Sheldon	Respond to of 5853

With talk of GSM moving to a CDMA format (via an European Telecommunications Standards Institute ruling) and CDMA itself seeing an impressive rollout (4 million subscribers in 3Q 1997, 16 million subscribers 3Q 1998) how does this factor into infrastructure buildout in areas such as base stations? How will a technology shift impact the wireless buildout? Does anyone have quantitative estimates for the projected growth rate for base stations in general? On the supply side, Vari-L, a component provider of VCOs and PLLs (which are instrumental in a base station operating properly) states in its 1997 annual report (p.10) that they supply 75% of the VCOs & PLLs in base stations (customers include AT&T, Ericsson, Lucent, Motorola, Nokia, Northern Telecom, Qualcomm, and other blue-chip names). Recently they stated in a phone call that their market share has risen to ~90% due to additional 1998 contract wins in Europe (displacing Japanese competitors). The revenues from these components accounted for approximately 82% of 1997 sales. Their market share gains from 20% in 1995 to the present level of ~90% has been on the strength of what they refer to as superior patented technology and hard work by their people. Also of interest, Vari-L has several new components for both optoelectronics modules and wireless handsets. They already have an opteoelectric component contract with Lucent (wideband transformer) and it has been rumored that a contract with Uniphase is imminent. Would anyone like to share their thoughts?

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (850)	12/1/1998 9:17:00 PM
From: Bargain Hunter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5853

In short, I just don't see where the big Java money is going to come from. I have always assumed that the idea is to encourage thin clients and fat servers, break the Microsoft lock on desktop software and make the money by having a larger server market. That strategy doesn't require much direct revenue from Java etc. So the licensing fees are more to do with keeping control than making money. If and when Java is used widely enough that the desktop hardware and software become largely irrelevant, then the battle will move to the server market. Microsoft likes to portray NT as winning the server wars because it sells in larger numbers than Solaris. But many of those NT sales have much more to do with Win95/98 compatibility than the merits of NT vs. Solaris. If Java makes that compatibility no longer significant, then NT will have to compete on the merits of the operating system itself. That is a battle Sun could win.

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (850)	12/1/1998 11:10:00 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5853

Bill, As far as current demand goes, how about 20 million set-top boxes running Java???? That's the deal already signed with TCI. Royalties never look good if you calculate on a per-licensee basis. What they make from embedded systems will be enhanced by the sale of business applications, and platforms like Java O/S for business that is being co-developed w/IBM. Then there's the thin clients, sold by SUNW & IBM, the market for dumb terminals alone is 30+ million just in the US. Don't forget the power of mindshare. SUNW's brand is greatly enhanced by Java. Lots of customers will line up behind their hardware to support the Java apps they will be running just because they want to stick with a winner. As far as Java performance goes, you have a point. SUNW is set to announce the new JDK 1.2 & it promises to be better & faster. We'll see. Embedded Java will be fast enough for just about all the network appliances that are set to come out & they do get royalties based on unit sales for all of them. Maybe you don't see the applicability of Java, but I believe that its limits have yet to be defined. Java is already the internet standard, and it has become that way because everyone realizes that there is a lot more money to be made when everyone can talk to everyone else simply and cheaply. What happened in the HWP deal is that SUNW threatened legal action (ala M$FT) for trademark infringement for their "clean room" Java. HWP backed down & promised to make their Java compliant. I didn't hear about any change in the fee structure as a result. HWP is in no position to challenge the Java standard, especially after the positive ruling SUNW just received 2 weeks ago against M$FT. Mark my words, IBM & SUNW are going to have the enterprise market sewn up. Who else is left, Bill??? DEC is gone, HWP might as well pack it in w/HPUX & Merced is an unqualified disaster for IA-64. They'll have to hustle McKinley out the door by 2004-2005 to get anywhere near the current SUNW Ultras. There's Sequent, SCO, & SGI as bit players. There's also the old Tandem (CPQ) market. I gotta tell you, Bill, that doesn't constitute what I would term competition for SUNW & IBM. Even German & Japanese hardware vendors like Siemens and Fujitsu are going to re-sell Solaris. M$FT isn't nibbling @SUNW's market. M$FT was never in SUNW's market. It's SUNW that is clobbering M$FT's market in workgroup servers with low-end Darwins that came out only this year. Check the news, Bill, SUNW is selling the 2-4processor servers so fast they have been back-ordered on them for the last 6 months. SUNW's low-end servers running Solaris out-perform NT on TPC benchmarks running Oracle databases. Their total cost of ownership is lower & even the initial price is lower than NT. On top of that, NT is a piece of junk that is going nowhere fast. NT 5.0 (Windows 2000) isn't going to be any better. cheers, cherylw

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (850)	12/2/1998 1:29:00 PM
From: Mark Fleming	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5853

The only way Sun will succeed in getting their Java licensed everywhere is by making only pennies per copy. Take the case of smart cards, for example. Assume a billion Java-based smart cards are issued over the next ten years and Sun gets 25 cents from each of them. That's $25 million. in licensing revenue per year--hardly anything for a company of Sun's size. Actually, that's $250 million, a slight difference of $225 million!