Sun to Build Alternative Desktop ?

murthydn writes " At "Sun Tech Days 2003" Developer Conference in India ,Sun Microsystems Inc Chairman, President and CEO Scott McNealy exhorted Indian software programmers to build Sun's "desktop computer" as an alternative system to Microsoft software architecture .The complete article is here" 'Cuz if there is one thing that will save Sun, its a new desktop platform. *cough*

Comments

if you actually read the article

[jbellis]

he said,

He said the desktop with a smart card reader capability would have Mad Hatter, Linux, Gnome, Evolution and Java's star office products

Sun's backed gnome for quite some time and that's not changing.

Re:They must be getting desperate...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems Sun is just wasting time and money on reinventing the wheel when supporting Apple would give them a boost.

They're not reinventing anything, they're just packaging up commodities including Linux and GNOME in an enterprise-friendly way and providing technical support. No other large company is in the position to do that because they are all party to some sort of Faustian bargain with Microsoft that prevents them from providing any alternative.

Re:Advangates?

[lindsayt]

I agree that MS Office is still (at this point) better than Openorffice/staroffice. However, the main point is that openoffice has a lot of potential *and* it's open-source and uses standards for the file saves. I use staroffice for all my word processing, and when I hit a bug (it's getting far less common now) I send in a bug report. Sure, right now it puts me out a little; but not much, and I'm contributing to something that has potential to far outshine MS office very soon.

In terms of the word processor, Star writer (the OO/SO wp) is nearly as feature-rich and almost exactly as good as MS Word. The others lag quite a bit, but the word processor is the most important in terms of getting wide acceptance.

Not two years ago my boss was telling me that all our machines had to be Suns because they were "more mature, all of the many minor kinks that plague [linux] are ironed out." Guess what? Today we use linux for everything that does not specifically require Sun, because those kinks were ironed out. We'll see the same thing with OO/SO I'm sure.