The pattern was the same for DG, Digital, and SGI once proprietary HW+OS, then specialized Intel compatible HW, then Nadda. Could this happen to Sun? If not, why? John A.

On 6/1/2006 at 9:48 PM Jules Richardson wrote: One thing in the computer biz that militates against "long lasting" is Moore's Law. You know, that "Your state-of-the-art PeeCee is obsolete by the time you get it home" effect. When and if true high-speed internet connectivity becomes realistic for the majority of the population,I'd expect this trend to accelerate. Right now, a 600 MHz PIII does just fine for a dialup or 1.5Mbps DSL connection, even running a pig like XP. In fact, Google's (right across the street from Sun, BTW) shown that you don't need hi-rel or particularly powerful computing resources to get a job done. Maybe Sun should have paid more attention to their neighbors. Maybe they did and decided that they couldn't do anything about it. Okay, so if the hardware doesn't matter that much, how about the software? Well, there's Solaris, but I've never found a compelling reason to use it. Microsoft is still the heavyweight and will continue to be so as long as its software is bundled with new systems. In fact, I suspect that shrink-wrapped software box sales of Vista will probably be disappointing, but that Vista will occupy the majority position in PCs simply through the phenomenon of normal product replacement. Cheers, Chuck

"Julian Wolfe" wrote: Hmmm. I believed that too, until two things happened to me: (1) I discovered my customers where all starting to use dual-cpu x86_64 cpu's and they where *blazingly* fast and (1) I spent some time with an HP server salesman who showed me some very high end, very reliable x86_64 based servers from HP. Back in the day ("are we off topic, yet?" :-), solaris was the most reliable thing going for 2, 4 and 8-way servers. And sun hardware was very very reliable. But I think that day has passed. Too bad; I always liked Andy "theese eess zee hardvare, and it verks" B. and his sparc architecture. (a friend worked on the sparc 1 and when andy delivered the first hardware to the software folks he said "this is the hardware, and it works!" - the famous last words, delivered with his accent. needless to say, there were bugs, so I always remember that and chuckle :-) -brad

Okay, I'm trying to decide if I should buy some SUNW and try for a bounce (closed at 4.55 today, down 1.7%). After reading the CEO's blog at: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=phase_2 I'm beginning to think that hoping for a bounce wouldn't be realistic. In particular, I can't figure out what this guy proposes to do differently. His revelation that "the internet's growing at an incredible rate" doesn't inspire confidence, nor does his statement about "green computing". So, if you were a betting person, long road into oblivion or a comeback into rosy-cheeked health? Cheers, Chuck

----- Original Message ----- From: "John Allain" <allain at panix.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2006 5:07 PM Subject: Re: Another once-bright star falling... I wouldn't put much money into any tech company based in the USA.