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

To: Trader$Rader who wrote (12615)	12/14/1998 12:52:00 AM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

The 12/14 New York Times Business Section version of the same story, with a tiny bit more info about the cross-licensing agreement: Dec 14, 1998 SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft's archrivals, Sun Microsystems and Oracle, plan to announce a joint effort on Monday to make corporate computer users less reliant on Microsoft's Windows software. Sun and Oracle intend to create network server computers that users of desktop machines can draw upon for many of their basic computing activities, reducing the need for a full-blown desktop operating system like Windows. The move is also meant to slow the rapid rise of Microsoft's office-network version of Windows, called Windows NT. It is a strategy that Sun and Oracle have pursued in the past, so far without success. The new plan is based on a cross-licensing agreement the two companies signed earlier this month. The agreement gave Oracle the ability to use a portion of Sun's Solaris operating system software to create simple server computers that would be designed to run Internet and office data base applications. The agreement also permits Sun to add Oracle's data base software to the Solaris operating system, which competes with Windows NT from Microsoft. The plan conforms to a strategy that has been outlined by Oracle's chairman, Lawrence Ellison, in his effort to fight Windows and Windows NT by doing away with the need for an operating system. Last month Ellison announced that Oracle planned to introduce a new version of its Oracle 8 data base program code-named Raw Iron, which he said would be sold by makers of PC server computers, including Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Dell Computer as an adaptation that would, in effect, render the operating system invisible to the user. The new strategy is a refinement of Ellison's attempt in years past to persuade corporate computer managers to simplify their networks by replacing the personal computer on a worker's desktop with a simpler terminal called a network computer. That effort had the support of Novell, Sun, Netscape and a number of other Microsoft rivals. The companies began plotting an alternative to the personal computer in 1995, based on the idea of inexpensive desktop computers that would download software via corporate networks. But the approach has been slow to develop, in part because of the sharply falling cost of personal computers and in part because computer makers have been slow to offer commercially viable systems. But Ellison and his allies have not given up. In its most recent iteration, the network computing idea now calls for almost all computing tasks to be centralized on servers, so that users' own computers will do little more than act as monitors for the server computers. Sun Microsystems, for example, has begun developing an experimental version called Newt, which the company describes as an "ultra-thin client." The device would have the advantage of reducing the costs of operating corporate computers while centralizing and simplifying their management. But it requires a relatively bureaucratic style of computing that takes away a great deal of the freedom to which users have become accustomed as they use PC's. Microsoft executives deride the Sun-Oracle approach as a style of computing that went out of fashion with the mainframes and minicomputers that held sway in the 1960s and 1970s. But the criticism has not deterred Ellison, who is promising a vast drop in the complexity and cost of computing for small businesses.