Bob Doolittle wrote:
Ivar Janmaat wrote:
World wide pc sales = 220 Million units a year.
At an average price of say 1000 dollar this amounts to 220 Billion
dollar a year turnover.
Say 1 % of those pc's are replaceable by Sun rays in countries like
The Netherlands, Korea and other countries with fast amounts of
broadband available at relatively low prices.
So this would create an extra yearly turnover for Sun of about
2.200.000 x say 500 dollar (server + sunray/per seat) = 1.1 Billion
dollars.
Can anyone explain to me why Sun would NOT be moving in this direction?
Because this is not our direct business. Our
strategy is to enable partners to succeed in this
sort of space. I suppose I'm not talking out of
school if I say that various ISPs have looked into
this, and perhaps still are. They are the ones
positioned to offer this service.
Bob, looking again at the Think Thin article the relevant section that
really caught my eye which prompted this whole debate was as follows:
------ snip ---------------
"I've met with pretty much every major ISP in the US, all of which have
expressed interest in having Sun Rays deployed in their customers homes.
At first glance, it's a very attractive proposition. A totally
stateless device that cannot be infected, does not have to be managed,
consumes almost zero power. Perfect. Back up the trucks and load 'em
up. One ISP exec was so spun up after seeing Sun Rays, he wanted to
combine them with something like NetFlix to create a video on demand to
any room in the house. Hot desk your favorite movie! Stop laughing,
it's a true story.
There's one big problem with these eager beaver ISPs. They want to sell
the pipe, the device, perhaps support. They don't want to sell or
manage the special sauce which is the server and the authentication and
disk space, and the (you get the point). It's the age old problem of
server based computing, while you can manage thousands of desktops from
a few servers, you still have to manage the servers. The self healing,
self managing, unbreakable OS is still the stuff of SciFi movies
unfortunately"
------ snip ---------------
I realise that providing a server environment to ISPs is not Sun's
direct business but as stated before a lot of the elements seem to be
there to provide this, even in an experimental format to one of those
ISPs who seemed so keen.
I think Sun is a superb company, pioneering in many ways and certainly
not risk averse but often when I read sites such as Silicon.com or
TheRegister the terms 'once great' and even 'beleaguered' are used in
conjunction. To me it seems folly if ISPs have shown such enthusiasm not
to try and capitalise in some way. Especially when they are so close
with this product.
Paul
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