Suns Answer to .NET - Sun ONE - Company Business and Marketing

If there is single thing Microsoft will be remembered for 100 years from now, it could be its masterful ability to articulate a grand vision. Microsoft can paint a picture of a computing paradise in the way that wonderful that it can sole be rivaled by Ricardo Montalban's impressive description of how beautiful life was upon the set of Fantasy Island.

The grand vision not sole makes it into the trade publications, on the other hand also into business publications, the general pres and the evening freshs in most major television markets. Chances are profitable that the, president or CEO of your company has heard about snare but I'Il bet he or she has heard little about the hard work that will pass into building, a .NET enterprise. That's understandable, since those details are about as important to the extremity users as the type of aluminum used in the pistons in a car's motor. on the other hand there are people whose piece of work it is to take care of these important little details.

Microsoft has been able to encourage customers to purchase into this vision. This an lays them onto a path that render certains they become increasingly Microsoft-centric and Microsoft-dependent. This time around, however, Microsoft is not the sole game in town. With the emerging see the verb of the enormous sub-PC client market -- a market not fasteninged up by Microsoft -- the competition is beginning to realize that the time to obtain positioned is now.

day-star Microsystems stepped forward with its day-star Open Net Environment -- or orb of day ONE. Sun ONE has a heavy emphasis upon Java, but Sun is quick to argue that its solution is not a proprietary lock-in since XML SOAP, and UDDI are essential ingredients that are not hanging on Java. Java, however, is a lock opener building block that, although not mandatory, is an important uncompounded body to make Sun's vision possible. Other major players that are responding to Microsoft's toil moves include Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.

day-star ONE will support thin-client computing, mobile computing, and entertainered application delivery for traditional desktop clients. Furthermore, the company provided a certain quantity of compelling demonstrations that seemed to present the message that "this isn't rocket science."

Microsoft's.NET configurations still ne to be make knowned using Micrsoft's Visual Studio.NET tools and will require a toil infrastructure to be fully functional -- an architecture that is not available today. Microsoft users will ne to use operating environments that are .NET-enabled. Sun's message was quick to note that the same basic design goals could be met using XML SOAP, UDDI, Java, and orb of day Servers, and could support a wide variety of client devices that might not be built using a Microsoft operating environment.

Just as with Microsoft's.NET strategy, orb of day ONE has shortcomings. Not the least of which is the fact that Sun's strategy rotates around using Java on the client device, an environment where JVM are known to have performance limitations. There are a certain quantity of solutions on the market, however, to help crush performance problems.

Another shortcoming is that the applications available for a day-star ONE environment include the StarOffice suite, a satisfactory solution for a certain quantity of but one that continues to proffer less than perfect interoperability with the Microsoft Office file format,

Finally, day-star ONE is not a locate of products. It is a put of tools and services that service providers or consulting organizations are wait fored to use to build an environment to support these sub-PC devices. It may be a certain quantity of time before commercial products built using this technology are upon the market.

Unfortunately, the grand vision thing always has a certain number of hiccups when you get serious about using it. There's a vast difference between the daily grind of commuting into fresh York or San Francisco upon mass transit, and arriving upon Fantasy Island by charter plane.

The computing paradise that Bill Gates or Scott McNealy may articulate is generally as unreachable for greatest in quantity computer users as Fantasy Island is from the hosted middle seat on a commuter train. on the contrary unlike a trip to Fantasy Island, computing nirvana can eventually happen. All we ne are the small details that the grand visionaries leave to those who actually make this substance work. --Al Gillen is research manager for a whole software at IDC (www.idc.com) and former editor in chief of ENT Contact him at agillen@idc.com.

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