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

To: Claude who wrote (14758)	3/15/1999 2:28:00 PM
From: Charles Tutt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

"Cheap standard PC industry hardware" has been threatening to "move into the high end space" for as long as I can remember, and its failure to do so hasn't been the result of any lack of a suitable OS (Solaris, after all, is also available for X86 machines). The problem is that "cheap" hardware isn't up to the tasks "high end" hardware is called upon to do. "High end" PC hardware is not cheap, despite the popular misconception that it is. JMHO.

To: Claude who wrote (14758)	3/15/1999 2:47:00 PM
From: cheryl williamson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

No Claude, SUNW has been making inexpensive harware for over a year now and it's selling them like crazy. They do it by using the many of the same manufacturing efficiencies used by PC makers. You can now buy a low-end Ultra 5 for about the same price as a Dell or CPQ. SUNW makes money whether you run Solaris or Linux (or Windoze) on it. It's still true that you need "big iron" for big jobs and "small iron" for small jobs and SUNW has it all, from single processor to 64SMP's in a box. cherylw (rhymes with "meryl")

To: Claude who wrote (14758)	3/15/1999 3:00:00 PM
From: Michael L. Voorhees	Respond to of 64865

Claude: Well sometimes "simplistic" solutions represent the best. We'll try and make it a little more complicated for you. The key, IMHO, is that SUNW's entire organization is tuned by objective to optimize the entire system,i.e. software+hardware, unlike MSFT. We have seen more than once the difficulties associated with organizational snafus between software and hardware vendors (e.g., MSFT and INTC, MSFT telling INTC not to get in the InterNet software business). What does one have when good management forms collaborative teams which understand both the hardware and the software; high performance matching the software with the hardware (including more processing bang for the buck). I truly believe Linux's propogation would proliferate SUNW's products dramatically. Why, because Linux and Solaris are both Unix derivatives, thus SUNW knows more about Linux (both its efficiencies and deficiencies; by the way SUNW has already endorsed Linux, unlike MSFT) than MSFT and can taylor their systems accordingly with no huge amount of effort. In addition, Linux is being positioned for the masses and if Linux paves the way for Unix to the masses it would certainly seem that it would not be much of a jump of faith to include Solaris (and Sparc) to more of these masses (which at present is minimal). JMHO