[ILUG] Have you had your daily dose of reality?

[Miles]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, John McDonnell jnr. wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> > http://www.dot-truth.com/
> surely someone has come up with something to refute this propapganda by
> now?

Nah, here at Sun we're too busy soaking up all the free publicity to
bother about Mc$oft's whining. It seems that so far all of the advertising
for win2k has dissed Sun in some way. It looks like the Mc$oft marketing
weenies are actually doing more work than the Sun marketing weenies to
promote Sun as Mc$oft's no.1 competitor. Cheers guys! People who never
heard of the company before are looking at these ads and thinking, "who
are these Sun people that seem to have Micro$oft running so scared that
they have to put them down at every opportunity?"

While I am loth to admit that there is *some* truth in some of the stuff
they say, it's interesting to note that they never make the distinction
between a company that produces nothing but software that runs (if that's
the word to use) on other people's hardware (them), and a company that
produces both its own software and the hardware it runs on (us). 

I'll just look at a few of the points they make here (taking a
microsoft-type approach and ignoring the bits I don't like):


"In a comparison of transaction-processing-solution price performance, 88
of the top 100 systems ran on Windows platforms"

- kind of hard to check this seeing as the TPC website only shows the top
10. 

"Today, a Solaris upgrade for a system with 16 to 32 processors costs
$32,000. For a system with 33 to 64 processors, the cost is $90,000"

- What has this got to do with Microsoft? They don't sell any hardware at
all?

"Customers want PCs, not Sun's proprietary thin clients. A majority of US
households value a personal computer as their most important appliance"

- The Sunray isn't aimed at the household market.

"Sun's upcoming UltraSPARC III will require replacement of existing
customer equipment." 

- Sure, and you can install Win2k on any old machine and expect it to
work.

"Confusion exists over Sun?s abandoned development tools and multiple new
acquired tool platforms. (emphasis missing)"

- the italics on 'acquired' on the webpage almost make it seem like a
dirty word or something. So, Mc$oft have never, ever bought out anyone
else?

"Analyst reports have repeatedly raised the issue of reliability problems
with Sun platforms"

- And no-one has ever complained about Windows?

"Windows runs 25 percent of Web sites worldwide; Sun runs 19 percent"

- This almost makes it sound like Windoze is the #1 webserver on the
planet. Apache (55% market share), anyone?
- It ain't hard to get that much market share when up until recently
almost every single Compaq, Dell and Gateway server sold had some breed of
windows pre-installed. 

"In one day alone, Dec. 7, 1999, a leading auction site suffered a system
outage of more than three hours when both Sun E10000 servers running the
site's back-end auction system failed. Meanwhile, the company's Web site
front-end, running on a Windows NT.-based server farm, has provided
continuous availability with no single point of failure."

- Yeah, I'm sure the front-end was as heavily loaded as the back-end.
- If NT is so good, why didn't they have it running the back-end as well
as the front-end?
- "no single point of failure" just means they couldn't pin it down to
just one fault.


"Other major sites include Barnes & Noble, InfoSpace etc."

- so what, we're running playboy.com, penthouse.com and dilbert.com. Which
set here do you think gets more hits? :-)


	....Miles 

kcolfer at iol.ie
kieran.colfer at ireland.sun.com
http://ireland.iol.ie/~kcolfer