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

To: Alok Sinha who wrote (15809)	4/28/1999 12:39:00 PM
From: Stormweaver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Proprietary iron (Sun) just doesn't make sense if you can avoid it in running your business; workstation wise at least. Compare a 2-way high-end Sun Ultra box versus a 2-way PIII config ; you'll see the Sun box is 4 times the PC price (20K vs. 5K). There is no more inherent reliability in a Sun workstation versus a PC workstation. >>Look at it this way, NT has just one of the above attributes - >> low price, and it is able to make inroads in the corporate >> desk-top space (and it is as proprietary as The corporate desktop is owned by MSFT right now ? UNIX workstations are still in financial/engineering shops where the only limitation is their portation of the applications to NT. The office products and other greater variety of vendors make MSFT ideal for workstation desktop. >>I could also offer Apple as an example of proprietary technology >>(hardware and software) being successful after they moved away from >>clones and re-defined their strategy under Jobs. Firstly apple is only a tiny fraction of the workstation market. They've managed to create a cool little workstation that appeals to "artsy" types and techno-illeterates; they created a niche market successfully. People that buy this proprietary technology will be seriously disappointed in about a year when they find out they have to throw out that cute little colored box since they can't upgrade it. Also they'll be a little upset when they see the premiums charged by add-on hardware and software vendors for the cute little thing. >>Additionally SUN is much more of a proponent of open standards than >>most companies, and that will continue to attract developers. Development cycles are changing. People are building what they need NOW, knowing full well that in 3-5 years they'll be throwing it away and starting from scratch. Open OS doesn't really matter anymore. Open OS is a fallacy because if you buy into that you still have a big chunk of proprietary iron left over after your switch to another vendor. Regarding my position I see upside for SUNW because of HP/DEC/IBM customer pickup (they've all mishandled the UNIX ball), and positive internet hype. Time-to-Short signs will be bad numbers from HP-UX in workstation sales, increased Linux penetration (watch DELL #'s), and eventually bad workstation sales for Sun. I think we'll see a computer/software stock crunch in SUNW 2000 1Q/2Q because of 2000 first though.