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An occasional commentary
by James E. Felton
No. 16

As editor of NC News I receive many interesting letters. Here is one I particularly enjoyed.

Your comments are welcome. I may post some of the best comments (with your permission).

James,

Just reading another article on Microsoft's recent assaults on Sun (or more accurately Java) and looking at your column at the same time, so I thought I'd drop you a line.

Of course Sun will survive the Microsoft assault. I have no idea why people think Microsoft is invincible or something. I know there is a long trail of dead bodies in their wake, but so too in Sun's, IBM's, Novell's, Oracle's, even Netscape's. Every successful company gets to the top over the bodies of their competitors.

This is not a bad thing - who wants to do business with a weak competitor?

There is an old saying "The race is not always to the swift nor victory to the strong - but that's the way to bet!" :-)

What you need to figure out in this debate is whether the competition is a sprint or a weighlift. In a stand up, knock down fight you could perhaps choose Microsoft, but I think this is more of an agility test, and Sun will clearly out-perform its larger but less agile competition.

Remember when Microsoft sprung Windows on an unsuspecting IBM and the big guns were finally bought to bear? Did IBM win, even though it had fairly thoroughly trounced every competitor up to that time?

NO! And the reason is ... simplified a great deal, nobody wins every time, not even IBM and not even Microsoft.

Sun is a tough competitor and they're a much harder nugget than most commentators seem to give them credit for.

What's more Sun will win because Sun's business model is focused on providing value to its customers, while Microsoft's is about hegemony first, customers later.

I know that the IT industry is generally among the slowest (in spite of our self-proclaimed high-tech image) to wake up and smell the coffee, but in this case I think the message will get through.

In fact, you could say that the customers of IT suppliers have already smelt the coffee - and it smells like Java!

The primary advantage Java offers the customer has little to do with technology per se. Its about independence and its about being, or more accurately feeling, in control of your own business. While Microsoft has usurped IBMs position as the uncrowned King of the IT community, it has also acquired the less enviable bouquets that went with that title. As in the IBM of yore, Microsoft's biggest customers, those businesses most dependent on and committed to Microsoft's technology - are the people who hate them the most!

I don't use that word lightly. Their customers generally don't dislike them, and they don't complain a lot about their products - they hate them. They resent the control over their destiny that Microsoft apparently revels in.

Until Microsoft has a watershed experience similar to IBM's 5 billion dollar hemorrhage of the early 90's, it will no doubt continue on it present course.

But this is no excuse for observers and commentators to fail to point out the obvious parallels, nor to reassure their readers that nothing lasts for ever. Nothing is surer than that Microsoft is bucking the odds for a big fall.

Regards,

Denver Fletcher
Architecture Consultant
Wellington, New Zealand.

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