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

To: Frank Wechsler who wrote (15624)	4/22/1999 5:16:00 PM
From: Stormweaver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

NT/Linux are the contenders for the existing UNIX workstation market (soon to be the PC market). The simple reason is price/performance/variety of components and operating systems can be changed. You can spend $20-30,000 on a fully loaded 2-way Sun Ultra-2 OR spend $5-7000 on a 2-way fully loaded PIII PC. Performance wise PIII is ahead as well. By going with a PC, the corporate world has the choice of many vendors (more inovation) of software and hardware. Inovation cycles are faster as well as you have many companies competing to get their features out first. Also who wants to pay 1000 bucks for a UNIX license on their workstation anymore when Linux is free ? The only advantage of the big UNIX vendors now is in the very high end machines ; > 16 way. This will also be leveled in the near future with clustering technology coming out now. Clustering technology makes $ sense when you have a number of relatively inexpensive machines; Linux + PC's on a network. IMHO

To: Frank Wechsler who wrote (15624)	4/22/1999 5:34:00 PM
From: Stormweaver	Respond to of 64865

Based on my research, if you look over the past 4 years UNIX workstation market has been shrinking. The only thing that keeps companies chained to UNIX workstations is the resistance to port their proprietary applications to NT. Now there are a plethera of tools to aid in the conversion, and those older applications are now being re-written in a more platform independant way (Java or other means). This opens up the choice for companies to choose the the best price/performance iron rather than being chained to an operating system. SGI felt the start of the PC-pinch last year... it will be felt by the rest of the UNIX community this year.