GOOD DAY, SUNSHINE! While Sun's new SPARCstation line will interest technologists as the first mass-market incursion of RISC machines onto desktops, it will interest customers for the software that it will run. We see Sun's initial goal as rendering obsolete the pcs that sit on many engineers' desks: either next to a Sun, to run spreadsheets, write reports and manage tabular data, or instead of a Sun, because the user's firm can't (won't?) pay for the very best. While we don't expect to see many engineers throw away their pcs, they may give them to department secretaries or apprentices, and turn to Sun for new purchases for themselves.
As for applications to exploit this connectivity, we expect to see Sun focus on incipient groupware markets such as electronic publishing and text base management, as well as traditional design and engineering applications and database servers. Sun has the opportunity to do for document management -- not just layout, but sharing and manipulation of content, from e-mail filtering to customized document generation -- what it has already done for engineering. (Interestingly, the graphics co-processors Sun has announced not only provide stunning graphics performance, but also speed up scrolling and display of text.) So far Sun has kept its software efforts under wraps, but Sun software evangelist Dave Cardinal is about to get more aggressive and visible, now that he has built up the staff to support such an effort.We believe Sun's potential Unique Selling Proposition, as its slogan implies, is connectivity...if it can effectively make its benefits tangible. Sun did this with the 386i, making networking integral and easy to use, but only among 386is. The new systems need not just connectivity among themselves and between desktop and printer, but among workstations and servers, encompassing a variety of heterogeneous machines, even non-UNIX ones.The problem is that if and when this finally does happen you won't have an excuse to take your secretary out to dinner and might actually have to converse with your partner - however distateful it may seem to you right now.Unfortunately the edge is slightly taken off the excitement about your commission when the order is refunded two hours later as it was made with a stolen credit card. Even worse when you discover it was the one that you left in the grocery store just hours before...The first is an email client so you can receive spam, viruses and ezines about how much better than you everyone else is doing.What can Sun's machines do that most users can't already do on a simple pc? Power increments are not enough to overcome the value-subtracted of switching to a new operating system and new applications, or of looking for applications that aren't there. The ability to run existing applications removes a problem but doesn't offer an incentive. There has to be even more. Sun already has a broad range of nicely scalable machines and software but no single, outstanding Unique Selling Proposition.Hochberg says differences in work philosophy eventually ended their marriage in 1969. "I'm more the playboy at heart, while she's the hard worker,' he says. "I just wanted to earn enough money to live the good life. I would have retired 25 years ago, if I could have afforded it.' When they divorced, Katz got the mail-order business.While NeXT has already signed up Lotus, Aldus and Ashton-Tate (as well as Sybase), its real edge in the Nineties will be its object-oriented development environment and the new applications and class libraries third parties will build with it, as described on pages 7 to 9. Meanwhile, Sun's approach is right for now, and if it can truly make communications transparent it will (properly) flourish over the years ahead. With time and third-party support, Sun will be able to offer the basic benefits of the NextStep environment -- maybe even while adhering to standards. Yes, NeXT has it now -- but perhaps before the world is even ready for it.Thirty-five years later, Lillian Katz, now married to display fixture manufacturer Robert Katz, has spread her U.S. operations from Mt. Vernon throughout the bedroom communities of New York City, with distribution warehouses in Port Chester, Elmsford and New Rochelle, N.Y. New Rochelle is also the location of her high tech communications center. For a company that receives 30,000 telephone orders weekly, the center is surprisingly quiet --not a ringing telephone anywhere. Operators listen and speak through headsets as they key in orders on computer terminals."I want the American manufacturers to become a little more creative and to really get out there and fight,' she says. "I don't think they're aggressive enough to go out for the business. They should; they'd get it.'
While NeXT has already signed up Lotus, Aldus and Ashton-Tate (as well as Sybase), its real edge in the Nineties will be its object-oriented development environment and the new applications and class libraries third parties will build with it, as described on pages 7 to 9. Meanwhile, Sun's approach is right for now, and if it can truly make communications transparent it will (properly) flourish over the years ahead. With time and third-party support, Sun will be able to offer the basic benefits of the NextStep environment -- maybe even while adhering to standards. Yes, NeXT has it now -- but perhaps before the world is even ready for it.
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