Just to be sure I understand, you had a great year and did well financially but are closing voluntarily while accusing sales tax inequities of killing your business, right? The business that you say is thriving and profitable, right?
So are you just pissed off that the state forces you to collect and forward taxes to them while on-line retailers without a physical presence in your state don't have to? Or are you just pissed off at the whole idea of sales taxes to the extent that you're willing to go out of business in protest?
Perhaps you've not noticed that legislatures everywhere are rushing to pass laws that force on-line retailers to collect the same taxes you do? Which would eliminate that apparent price advantage they have over you while they still keep the disadvantage of both shipping costs and the delayed gratification which annoys their customers.
Perhaps you could just do a "virtual on-line store(tm)" (patent pending) where your customers either at home or in your facility select what they want, place the order, pay for it by credit card, and then you personally run into the warehouse, gather up the items, and hand it to them. You get to eliminate those pesky employees (neatly saving all that money wasted on payroll - which you now get to pocket) while the customer gets "immediate gratification(tm)" (patent pending) without shipping charges. Should on-line retailers be forced to collect sales taxes, you can now actually undercut their prices should you choose. This is clearly a win-win situation no matter how it plays out.
Oh, and those items that you inflate the prices on to provide for future service? Quit selling them.
Ten or so years ago it was possible to run Windows applications (via Wabi) and Mac software (via a product with an unmemorable name) on top of SPARC/Solaris. It was possible to run Solaris apps, Windows apps, and Mac apps simultaneously on one system. Unfortunately both Windows and Mac apps were constrained by the speed of the underlying hardware and the need for processor emulations. With Sun and Apple now building X86 hardware, is it time to re-introduce those tools?
How much time and money did they spend on a system without, apparently, having first determined if the various bits would play nicely together? How did they manage to get to the point of going live without testing? Why did the CIO discover fundamental issues only after system failures? Just who are these folks and why do they still have jobs?
If we retire the entire NASA infrastructure and all of the taxpayer-funded hardware and facilites, is there any chance that private enterprise will take over and build huge boosters and space ports? Tracking systems and worldwide telemetry nets? Will they give us more apparently unprofitable science missions to other planets? Will they build huge boosters and space ports? Will they do more than NASA does now and with their own money? Are you nuts? They'll ask the government to sign contracts carrying about the same cost per mission as NASA - if we want space missions, the taxpayer will still be paying for them. Left to their own funding and devices, the best we can hope for is more faux space ships carrying tourists at speeds and elevations far too low to achieve orbit.
Don't buy anything and simply wait until they finally come up with a unified standard. The fact that they couldn't negotiate a deal because they both had products in the pipe rather suggests that neither of them was there to compromise.
The article seems to be comparing a $100 million implementation on a thing called UNIX against a $2.5 million dollar implementation using Linux on Intel. What's a UNIX? And why does it cost so much? A clearer definition of the hardware platforms being compared would be quite useful.
Additionally, in my opinion, the guy should have been canned by Cendant the moment United Airlines was off the air for 45 minutes. If YOU were responsible for this serious a screwup would you still have a job? Probably not.
Sun has always (well, for at least the last 15 years) offered a range of products from desktop to large servers. They've never abandoned any part of that range. They have, like all vendors, introduced products which weren't big hits and which were ultimately discontinued, but they've never simply abandoned any part of their product range.
Also, "they've tried PCs numerous times"? Care to name a couple of those times?
I remember sitting in an HP presentation in (I think) 1994 when they first announced this CPU transition. Seems to have taken them about eight years longer than they promised at the time.
Or at least not worth that much when the combined market caps of Daimler Chrysler ($41.5B), Ford ($18.9B) and General Motors ($18.2) is only $78.6 billion. Compare and contrast their combined real, physical assets to those of Google.
Yes, I understand what Publius meant when he said "everything is worth what someone will pay for it", but I still suspect that selling off the assests of Daimler, Ford, and GM (dozens of huge factories, countless acres of land, ships, airplanes, etc.) would produce larger revenues than selling off those of Google (dozens of thousands of old PCs).
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...and then you buy a new computer and start the same cycle over again.
Just to be sure I understand, you had a great year and did well financially but are closing voluntarily while accusing sales tax inequities of killing your business, right? The business that you say is thriving and profitable, right?
So are you just pissed off that the state forces you to collect and forward taxes to them while on-line retailers without a physical presence in your state don't have to? Or are you just pissed off at the whole idea of sales taxes to the extent that you're willing to go out of business in protest?
Perhaps you've not noticed that legislatures everywhere are rushing to pass laws that force on-line retailers to collect the same taxes you do? Which would eliminate that apparent price advantage they have over you while they still keep the disadvantage of both shipping costs and the delayed gratification which annoys their customers.
Perhaps you could just do a "virtual on-line store(tm)" (patent pending) where your customers either at home or in your facility select what they want, place the order, pay for it by credit card, and then you personally run into the warehouse, gather up the items, and hand it to them. You get to eliminate those pesky employees (neatly saving all that money wasted on payroll - which you now get to pocket) while the customer gets "immediate gratification(tm)" (patent pending) without shipping charges. Should on-line retailers be forced to collect sales taxes, you can now actually undercut their prices should you choose. This is clearly a win-win situation no matter how it plays out.
Oh, and those items that you inflate the prices on to provide for future service? Quit selling them.
Ten or so years ago it was possible to run Windows applications (via Wabi) and Mac software (via a product with an unmemorable name) on top of SPARC/Solaris. It was possible to run Solaris apps, Windows apps, and Mac apps simultaneously on one system. Unfortunately both Windows and Mac apps were constrained by the speed of the underlying hardware and the need for processor emulations. With Sun and Apple now building X86 hardware, is it time to re-introduce those tools?
How much time and money did they spend on a system without, apparently, having first determined if the various bits would play nicely together? How did they manage to get to the point of going live without testing? Why did the CIO discover fundamental issues only after system failures? Just who are these folks and why do they still have jobs?
If we retire the entire NASA infrastructure and all of the taxpayer-funded hardware and facilites, is there any chance that private enterprise will take over and build huge boosters and space ports? Tracking systems and worldwide telemetry nets? Will they give us more apparently unprofitable science missions to other planets? Will they build huge boosters and space ports? Will they do more than NASA does now and with their own money? Are you nuts? They'll ask the government to sign contracts carrying about the same cost per mission as NASA - if we want space missions, the taxpayer will still be paying for them. Left to their own funding and devices, the best we can hope for is more faux space ships carrying tourists at speeds and elevations far too low to achieve orbit.
When there's a buck to be made at little or no risk. Not before.
Is your manager a member of the family that owns the business? The answer makes all the difference in the world.
Don't buy anything and simply wait until they finally come up with a unified standard. The fact that they couldn't negotiate a deal because they both had products in the pipe rather suggests that neither of them was there to compromise.
The article seems to be comparing a $100 million implementation on a thing called UNIX against a $2.5 million dollar implementation using Linux on Intel. What's a UNIX? And why does it cost so much? A clearer definition of the hardware platforms being compared would be quite useful.
Additionally, in my opinion, the guy should have been canned by Cendant the moment United Airlines was off the air for 45 minutes. If YOU were responsible for this serious a screwup would you still have a job? Probably not.
I call BS.
Sun has always (well, for at least the last 15 years) offered a range of products from desktop to large servers. They've never abandoned any part of that range. They have, like all vendors, introduced products which weren't big hits and which were ultimately discontinued, but they've never simply abandoned any part of their product range.
Also, "they've tried PCs numerous times"? Care to name a couple of those times?
I remember sitting in an HP presentation in (I think) 1994 when they first announced this CPU transition. Seems to have taken them about eight years longer than they promised at the time.
Good point. What possible motivation could the self-admittedly dishonest researchers have for risking everything just to be truthful in a survey?
It's only been about 10 years since Sun tried to buy Apple and let Apple build low-end SPARC-based Sun systems.
Or at least not worth that much when the combined market caps of Daimler Chrysler ($41.5B), Ford ($18.9B) and General Motors ($18.2) is only $78.6 billion. Compare and contrast their combined real, physical assets to those of Google.
Yes, I understand what Publius meant when he said "everything is worth what someone will pay for it", but I still suspect that selling off the assests of Daimler, Ford, and GM (dozens of huge factories, countless acres of land, ships, airplanes, etc.) would produce larger revenues than selling off those of Google (dozens of thousands of old PCs).
"Eye candy" is really getting old. Time to find a new synonym for photographs or art work.