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From: gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Don Gillies)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Intel and Sun: from a MBA viewpoint
Message-ID: <1991Feb20.080511.13105@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 20 Feb 91 08:05:11 GMT
References: <30522@usc>
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Lines: 31

ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes:

>What is this story telling us?  Does this mean that market
>pressures prefer corporate strategies like Intel's -- no matter
>how terrible Intel might be towards it's customer base?  If you
>did a startup today, would you try the Sun path or the
>Intel/Microsoft/IBM way?

Relatively speaking, the Intel/IBM/Microsoft platform is more of an
open architecture than the Sun platform, if you judge openness by the
number of (cpu, card, monitor) vendors that compete for market share.
That is why Intel is doing so well.  MS-DOS has always been an open
operating system -- clone BIOS's began to arrive just months after the
PC was introduced.  I believe that Sun did not license SunOS until
years after MS-DOS was widely available.

In other words, Sun may seem like an "open architecture" company, but
the PC is much more of an open machine than a SPARC workstation.

Since Intel makes chips and Sun makes turnkey UNIX boxes, they are not
really comparable.  Compare Sun to any PC systems vendor.  Is any
clone vendor making the same ROA (return on assets) as Sun?  I bet the
answer is no.  Most clone makers are struggling to keep their heads
above water.

Intel charges *fair* prices for their CPU chips, and they deliver mass
quantities sooner than nearly all other microprocessor merchants.
This appearance of timeliness (their chips are always buggy when first
delivered) and capability for high volume deliveries, are two reasons
why they make (and deserve) a healthy profit.
--