[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Good analysis, Nick. Read an article in a trade journal once, that said that if you want to look at a marriage made in heaven, look at AMD and Sun. I was convinced then and am now. The x86 architecture is a winner. The Solaris OS may or may not be a winner in the marketplace, but it is the very best thing that Sun makes. Nobody (that I know of) buys Sun because they love the Sparc chip. People buy Sun (IMHO) because they want Solaris. If you take the very best of the Unix OS's and you marry it up to what well may be the best migration path to 64 bits for the x86 you have, it seems to the article and to me, a surefire winner. I would think Sun could do a lot better by jettisoning the Sparc architecture since competing against the giants in the chip space is difficult at best and nigh unto impossible at worst. If you could buy a cheap, high performance server with the Opteron 64 bit chip and the latest version of Solaris with full support, I would think that would be a compelling buy. And it would be the best hope for both Sun and AMD to fight the Wintel juggernaut. Will we see it, I dunno. Would be interested in your thoughts.

Also I think the comment that was made about Java on phones is right on target (and I guess is another shot in the arm for Sun). It looks to me like Java on phones is going to be as popular as popcorn at movie theatres. Probably not as profitable (think of the markup on popcorn plus you get to sell all those overpriced drinks to boot) but certainly as prevalent.

Your thoughts?

[Nick Danger]

if you want to look at a marriage made in heaven, look at AMD and Sun.

I thought the obvious marriage was Sun and Apple; that would have produced a single company with a product line that went from desktop to big iron. IBM and HP already have that; Sun was the one guy who didn't, unless you count those "pizza box" things that Sun tried to peddle. That deal would have been a lot easier to put together before Jobs came back to Apple. I think McNealy missed his chance.

I don't think CPU chip prices are that big a deal, as an element of cost, once you get above a certain-sized box. Sun doesn't have to get SPARC down to the manufacturing cost of an AMD chip; they only have to equal AMD's price to them, which on Opteron (or Itanium) they can probably do already, even with their modest volumes. IBM is in the same position with the Power chips. The market for 64-bit chips is so rarified that nobody is going to see Pentium-4 class volumes any time soon. By the time that happens, IBM and Sun will have 128-bit implementations; that's how you play that game.

As for Java on phones, Sun is giving that away to the phone guys... they literally intend to sell the "blades" in the back room. They figure if Java is on the phones, they'll get their share of all the big boxes it will take to ride herd on all those millions of phones out there.

The mobile phone business is even more cutthroat than the desktop PC market. Margin-wise, these are consumer-volume hardware guys flying five feet over the trees. There is no room in the bill of materials for a Microsoft-priced operating system. A pure software company will have a hell of a time in that market, because guys like Sun have every incentive to give the razors away, just to get the blades on the back end.