You can run Linux on Sun hardware. A few people do, but most people want to take advantage of the benefits that Solaris gives you when run on the hardware. (64 bit, scalable to 64 processors... etc).
As for the price of the hardware, it is actually competitively priced. It can do a lot of things that the cheap Intel computers can NEVER do, due to the hardware design.
Heh yeah. I really liked how MS charged $70 for a time limited copy of Win 2000 BETA. Microsoft gives things away that will benefit them by giving it away, Sun gives things away that only kinda sorta benefit them by giving it away. Take StarOffice for example. Sun paid megabucks for the company/program, and they give the office program away for free.
Um, can we say flamebait? SunOS is based on Berkley unix, not on linux at all. It also can run on the >64 processor, 16 processor/memory board E10000 whereas Linux can't scale even close. Get your facts straight before you start spouting off nonsense.
Re:An important distinction.
on
Geeks vs. Nerds
·
· Score: 1
I agree with this... "band geek" comes to mind... I haven't heard them called "band nerds" because they're not nerds, they're geeks!:)
Actually the result would be that no one would upgrade... I only upgraded to Win 98 back in Sept because I HAD to (bought a laptop with DVD, and had trouble networking the W98 laptop and W95 desktop). Because people already have spent thousands of dollars on software other than the OS (games, productivity, money management, and so on) - would you rather pay $500 for an OS or $3000 to replace your applications? Should the consumers have to PAY (to get new applications, or do what Microsoft says) because MS decides to abuse their monopoly status (which is against the law)? I don't think so! It's not about being dependent on Microsoft, it's about being able to continue to be productive, using applications that we've already spent good money for.
1) What about games? How many businesses use games? I would say very few. How many games get pirated... I would say a LOT. Poke around on some warez sites and see all the games they claim you can download. If there is a game you want, and you manage to find it, will you fork over $50 for the box? I don't think so. If your friend buys a game on CD and you can make a copy of it, will you pay the money for the real version? Most people who do that wouldn't.
2) And what kind of documentation comes with Windows, Office, etc anyways? Very shitty documentation. Any normal user has to buy an expensive book, so what is the use of the 50 page book that comes with Windows/Office/Frontpage (to name a few off the top of my head) - firewood. If you could get a copy of Office on CD from your buddy, you'd save $400 for the media, and pay $50 for a book that you'd have to buy anyways.
I'm not saying any of this is legal or ethical, I'm just saying it happens all the time, and if it was impossible for people to do this copying, you bet the companies would be making more money.
Solaris IS the "most scalable, robust, reliable" OS on the planet, but on ultra-cheap PCs, nah forget it. Just for writing email/browsing the web, etc, Solaris (as are most full functioning OSs) is overkill. Not to mention it'd add to the cost of the PC just as much as Winblows would.
I've seen commercials for these $100 machines that you can just write email on, and that's it. (One is portable, although I don't know HOW portable it is). They show a kid getting an email from grandma, and he can't believe it's from grandma and thinks it's from his sister.
Great for the person who has no use for a computer but wants to write email, but they're kinda ugly and probably have some proprietary monthly service charge. (As in, if this company goes under, your email machine is worthless).
However I have a couple computers and no need for such a device, so I may be totally wrong. But I do think that these are the kind of people these new devices are going to be aimed for, and probably won't have a "real" OS in it. Just one that allows it to view web pages, write email, and possibly use a chat like AIM.
Which is what WebTV does already (saves you the cost of a monitor, which these new devices won't do)... so we'll see how these new devices do.
If I could hook up one of these new devices up to my home LAN (which goes through my cable modem) and stick it in the living room or in a bedroom, and would offer ICQ, web,telnet, hey i'd go for it... hmmmmmmmmmm
Why are they releasing the Dreamcast in the UK with a 33.6 modem "initially"?? 56k has been a standard for the past couple years now, and they're not all that expensive. That just doesn't quite make sense to me.
The cable companies that supply the cable internet connection may have a problem with people connecting their Non Windows 98 boxes to the cable modem. They seem to have a fit if you say you're going to connect your Linux box up to the cable modem - (well you can do it but "NO SUPPORT FOR YOU!!!!"). Since Dreamcast doesn't run on windows (at least, God I hope it doesn't) are they going to tell the teenage boys who just want to play their games that they can't do it even though Sega says they can? Oh yeah and if you have to have a login program to log onto the cable network (RR used to do this in my area, but quit, but I know they still do it in other areas) that won't work anyways. Sega's going to have to do some major dealing to get it to work with all the cable providers.
1. Kitty watching owner have sex 2. Kitty watching owner take a shower 3. Kitty watching owner sit on the toilet 4. Kitty watching owner get dressed
My cats' favorite pasttime is "watching owner", so I can just see it now, I take in a stray and end up being plastered all over the porn (Pussy-cam) web sites. Lovely.
Of course they'd have to be really patient to sit through scenes of kitty snoozing, and then not looking at the really "interesting" things while they're going on. Heh.
I think in general the huge technology boom has been a good thing. More jobs out on the marketplace (part of the good economy we've got right now), more security (keep a cell phone for when your car breaks down, etc), more communication (how many letters did you write vs the amount of email you write now?)...
But of course it's got its bad points too. I don't read books nearly as much as I used to when I was in high school (and earlier). Kids these days spend their time chatting online rather than attempting to get real life friends, and doing real life stuff with their friends. Oh yeah how much more money in my budget do I need to spend to get "connected"... $50 for the cell phone, $50 for the cable modem/cable tv... money that would've been spent elsewhere 5 years ago.
Or how about the college students who flunk out of school because of internet addiction? Without the internet, these students probably would've still been in school. I remember freshman year (94-95) when I discovered the text irc at school. It was hard not to be tempted to skip classes because of an interesting conversation. I probably would've spent more time at the rec center or the library had I not discovered this other entertainment.
Of course I get paid to be a computer geek (like probably a majority of/.ers) and I'm a technophile but still, it's not all great and glorious like a lot of the media is making it out to be. There is some "bad" mixed in with the "good".
If Ebay was smart, they could cash in on this. They make money for every person who sells something on Ebay. They could have their own internal spider that finds the changes in the database and doles it out, maybe once an hour to some other site that pays them to have the honor. They make money, there is less bandwidth used, and the other sites still have the option to have an ebay search on their site (although prob not realtime, but oh well).
I felt the same way until someone found out my name, birthdate, and SSN and got a cell phone in my name. No idea how they got the information, all I know is they live in my city (~1 mil people) and Airtouch Cellular figured out that it was possibly fraudular, and sent me a letter, and ended up not holding me accountable.
My point is, with information, people can do some really shady things. I have a cable modem, and I don't run any services on my win98 box, and try to hide my IP whenever possible, but who knows, bad things happen when you least expect it.
I seem to recall a court case from business legal studies course, where Johnny Carson sued a port-a-potty company for calling the company "Here's Johnny!" (get it, ha ha) Well the port-a-potty company eventually lost, and had to change their name since the average person would think it's referring to Johnny Carson and think that he's endorsing the port-a-potty company.
I think that should this go to court, that AOL has a chance of winning, on the same grounds. On the other hand, I'm just a computer geek, not a lawyer, so they could think up something totally different and AOL will lose (since they couldn't trademark their IM and "You've got Mail"...)
Well, then a company with 10,000 employees could feasibly get 10,001 domain names anyways, plus any foreign ones. (As long as those employees didn't want a domain name of their own...)
I have a home intranet, and all my computers can access the internet and only have one IP address assigned to me. They just go through the proxy, and the proxy routes the traffic to the correct recipient. It doesn't matter that the internal IP addresses are more than likely the same as someone else's IP because no one else sees it but the proxy server. Why would your company need more than a minimal number of IP addresses, unless you want every box on your network directly connected to the internet?
The y2k problem was a known problem with a known date, yet so many companies are waiting till the last minute to do anything about it. I think that this will be the same with the "running out of IPs" problem. If the forecasted date of sometime in 2010 is true, then I bet come late 2009, people will be frantically trying to think of a quick solution. That's just how people are, anything that requires added cost, will be done as late as possible. Hell, the oil reserves are supposed to run out in 30 years (AFAIK) and what are we doing about it now? Not a whole hell of a lot.
As for toasters,cars,coffeepots, all having their own IPs... I can see it happening with cars. Think about it, your car has a computer inside it that monitors the system, and -today- you can take your car into a mechanic, and with their own kind of computer, can hook up with your car's computer and find out what is wrong. I bet that in the near future, cars will have IPs, so that they can remotely talk to the mechanics' computers. And while we're at it, have a thing, where if someone steals your car, they can find out where the IP is located at. There are a hell of a lot of cars on the planet, aren't there?
And then there is the connectivity of cell phones, PDAs, people having dedicated lines to their computers in their home (eg. cable modems - connected all the time, so always have an IP). You have to remember that the IPs are not just for the USA, but for the rest of the world as well... the LDCs are beginning to be more connected, and as this develops, more IPs will be needed. With 6 billion people, if even half of them had at least one device that had an IP, it's easy to see that the 4 billion limit can run out very quickly.
It's going to eventually be like the area code problem, and have to punch in 10 digit numbers for local calls. Gawd, hopefully they won't run out of area codes...
I think that this will catch on, and here's why. Think of all the revenue that Adobe and MS and other software companies lose to people copying the software. They copy it because it's not all that hard to, and the software costs $300-$700 a copy. Most casual users don't want to pay that kind of money for a quality program when they don't use it more than once or twice a week (if that). Imagine an application service provider that has "lean" versions with all the capabilities of the larger copy (maybe only dl the tool when you use it, and then cache it or something), that you can't just copy onto your hard drive and use. Perhaps you sign up to this app serv prov (ASP) for say, $10-$20/mo and can use any of oodles of quality programs. If you use Photoshop, then the ASP gives a certain % or $ amt to Adobe. The software vendors make $ from it, the customer can have a choice of software they wouldn't be able to (legally) otherwise. The "power users" are the ones who generally buy the copy anyways, probably wouldn't opt for this. Maybe as an option to the service, you could choose to save what you make on the server or on your hard drive. If you need to access it somewhere else, then maybe leave it on the server temporarily. Yeah, there are some bugs (like how to stop people from passing the password to one account around) but those are the intricacies for the programmers to figure out.:) I prefer to keep my email on a server rather than on my local hard drive. There always comes a time where I have some info in my mailbox (saved or inbox) that I need to access, and wouldn't you know, I've got my laptop and not on my desktop, or I'm at a friend's house. Anything business related is on the company's server behind the firewall (which we use IMAP so it's always on the server, and with Iplanet, is accessible from anywhere, securely). Just because one "free" email service has a security hole doesn't mean that all internet services that store data are insecure.
I don't know of any high end computer systems vendors who post their prices on the web. They will usually have a "book" value, and then if you buy so much per year, you'll get some sort of discount. Buying them from resellers will also get you a different price (because you are getting an "added value" with it).
Sun also has 140 former Star Division employees as well as the former Star Division CEO as the VP in charge of the application and webtop. I think Marco probably understands the market as well as those 140 employees.
You also forget that Sun DOES have a vested interest in Star Office. First off, it is Sun's corporate philosophy that systems be non-proprietary and open. Second is the "network is the computer" and "run anything, any time, anywhere, on any device" (Microsoft has also taken up the latter, but that is besides the point.)
80% of the traffic on the Internet runs on Sun machines, if more people start using the internet and ISPs and others have more uses for servers, Sun will make money on the deal. Sun is planning on offering Star Portal, which will be able to be used on the thin-client model. Thin clients run well on what... Sun servers. I think that is a vested interest, don't you agree?
The Sun and Netscape alliance has the Iplanet offerings. The Iplanet webtop allows you to log into your corporate intranet using a browser. You don't have to dial into the company modem pool in order to use it... you could be at an internet cafe, on a cable modem, or at some other company.
Say you have a presentation. Rather than lugging a laptop to a client site, you can log into a computer at the client site, and show the presentation through the browser (via Iplanet and StarPortal). That is only one use for it. With the Star Portal being available, they will certainly sell more Iplanet products.
The answer: Yes. Many companies lease computers for a couple years, then get new ones. Letting the leases expire and instead "upgrading" to a thin client (which costs MUCH less in hardware AND in support) isn't yanking out existing infrastructure, it's doing what they would do anyways. Just, upgrading to a better model. They can decrease their support staff (help desk, pc gurus) and have a couple people answering phones (for help on the "how do i..." more than why do I get a BSOD) and a person to watch over the server(s).
I can see the cable companies combining the cable modem with the tv top box (Time Warner has one that you use your remote and access the tv listings, programs your vcr, and lets you get pay per view movies, and on-screen tv listings as you change the channel) and offering the email, word processing, web surfing, etc. functionality to it. You don't even have to BUY the cable modems (at least with TW) or tv boxes these days, you rent them which is included in the monthly service. No more buying PCs for the joe schmo user. The computer becomes just another appliance.
Think of the potential revenue that will come indirectly from this. If companies like the idea of saving money by converting to a thin-client model (of a server and cheap desktops with very little support), this can help Sun's revenues significantly. Sun is a hardware vendor firstly and a software vendor secondly. Over the course of years, (through sales of support + hardware) Sun will make much more than what they paid for Star Div.
The thin client model is for the enterprise... For a company with 2000 end users in a building where everyone pretty much only uses an office application, email, and groupware, do you really need a PC where a lot of things can mess up or go wrong? A cheap thin client with no moving parts can save companies tons of money in support.
The paragraph you quoted did say that work on all new versions of Star Office will continue, including Linux and Windows versions.
As for office applications on the web, if you rarely use spreadsheets or presentations, why should you install a few hundred meg on your hard drive, if you could create something on a web page, save it/print it locally? If you use it all the time, then yeah it'd probably be better to have it on your hard drive, but for the occasional user, something web based would be perfectly sufficient.
No, you have that completely wrong. Sun bought Star Div because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to continue to develop the product, since they weren't making any money on it. Since Star Office runs on Solaris, it is a major application that helps to sell Sun's products. Sun is going to continue to develop Star Office, otherwise it may not continue to be compatible with MS Office, and that is the major reason to use Star Office. The open source is just in case someone wants to do something with the source, it's not a "hand off" to stop developing it.
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You can run Linux on Sun hardware. A few people do, but most people want to take advantage of the benefits that Solaris gives you when run on the hardware. (64 bit, scalable to 64 processors... etc).
As for the price of the hardware, it is actually competitively priced. It can do a lot of things that the cheap Intel computers can NEVER do, due to the hardware design.
Heh yeah. I really liked how MS charged $70 for a time limited copy of Win 2000 BETA. Microsoft gives things away that will benefit them by giving it away, Sun gives things away that only kinda sorta benefit them by giving it away. Take StarOffice for example. Sun paid megabucks for the company/program, and they give the office program away for free.
Um, can we say flamebait? SunOS is based on Berkley unix, not on linux at all. It also can run on the >64 processor, 16 processor/memory board E10000 whereas Linux can't scale even close. Get your facts straight before you start spouting off nonsense.
I agree with this... :)
"band geek" comes to mind... I haven't heard them
called "band nerds" because they're not nerds,
they're geeks!
Actually the result would be that no one would upgrade... I only upgraded to Win 98 back in Sept because I HAD to (bought a laptop with DVD, and had trouble networking the W98 laptop and W95 desktop). Because people already have spent thousands of dollars on software other than the OS (games, productivity, money management, and so on) - would you rather pay $500 for an OS or $3000 to replace your applications? Should the consumers have to PAY (to get new applications, or do what Microsoft says) because MS decides to abuse their monopoly status (which is against the law)? I don't think so! It's not about being dependent on Microsoft, it's about being able to continue to be productive, using applications that we've already spent good money for.
1) What about games? How many businesses use games? I would say very few. How many games get pirated... I would say a LOT. Poke around on some warez sites and see all the games they claim you can download. If there is a game you want, and you manage to find it, will you fork over $50 for the box? I don't think so. If your friend buys a game on CD and you can make a copy of it, will you pay the money for the real version? Most people who do that wouldn't.
2) And what kind of documentation comes with Windows, Office, etc anyways? Very shitty documentation. Any normal user has to buy an expensive book, so what is the use of the 50 page book that comes with Windows/Office/Frontpage (to name a few off the top of my head) - firewood. If you could get a copy of Office on CD from your buddy, you'd save $400 for the media, and pay $50 for a book that you'd have to buy anyways.
I'm not saying any of this is legal or ethical, I'm just saying it happens all the time, and if it was impossible for people to do this copying, you bet the companies would be making more money.
Solaris IS the "most scalable, robust, reliable" OS on the planet, but on ultra-cheap PCs, nah forget it. Just for writing email/browsing the web, etc, Solaris (as are most full functioning OSs) is overkill. Not to mention it'd add to the cost of the PC just as much as Winblows would.
I've seen commercials for these $100 machines that you can just write email on, and that's it. (One is portable, although I don't know HOW portable it is). They show a kid getting an email from grandma, and he can't believe it's from grandma and thinks it's from his sister.
Great for the person who has no use for a computer but wants to write email, but they're kinda ugly and probably have some proprietary monthly service charge. (As in, if this company goes under, your email machine is worthless).
However I have a couple computers and no need for such a device, so I may be totally wrong. But I do think that these are the kind of people these new devices are going to be aimed for, and probably won't have a "real" OS in it. Just one that allows it to view web pages, write email, and possibly use a chat like AIM.
Which is what WebTV does already (saves you the cost of a monitor, which these new devices won't do)... so we'll see how these new devices do.
If I could hook up one of these new devices up to my home LAN (which goes through my cable modem) and stick it in the living room or in a bedroom, and would offer ICQ, web,telnet, hey i'd go for it... hmmmmmmmmmm
Why are they releasing the Dreamcast in the UK with a 33.6 modem "initially"?? 56k has been a standard for the past couple years now, and they're not all that expensive. That just doesn't quite make sense to me.
The cable companies that supply the cable internet connection may have a problem with people connecting their Non Windows 98 boxes to the cable modem. They seem to have a fit if you say you're going to connect your Linux box up to the cable modem - (well you can do it but "NO SUPPORT FOR YOU!!!!"). Since Dreamcast doesn't run on windows (at least, God I hope it doesn't) are they going to tell the teenage boys who just want to play their games that they can't do it even though Sega says they can? Oh yeah and if you have to have a login program to log onto the cable network (RR used to do this in my area, but quit, but I know they still do it in other areas) that won't work anyways. Sega's going to have to do some major dealing to get it to work with all the cable providers.
Top things to view on the Kitty Cam
1. Kitty watching owner have sex
2. Kitty watching owner take a shower
3. Kitty watching owner sit on the toilet
4. Kitty watching owner get dressed
My cats' favorite pasttime is "watching owner", so I can just see it now, I take in a stray and end up being plastered all over the porn (Pussy-cam) web sites. Lovely.
Of course they'd have to be really patient to sit through scenes of kitty snoozing, and then not looking at the really "interesting" things while they're going on. Heh.
I think in general the huge technology boom has been a good thing. More jobs out on the marketplace (part of the good economy we've got right now), more security (keep a cell phone for when your car breaks down, etc), more communication (how many letters did you write vs the amount of email you write now?)...
/.ers) and I'm a technophile but still, it's not all great and glorious like a lot of the media is making it out to be. There is some "bad" mixed in with the "good".
But of course it's got its bad points too. I don't read books nearly as much as I used to when I was in high school (and earlier). Kids these days spend their time chatting online rather than attempting to get real life friends, and doing real life stuff with their friends. Oh yeah how much more money in my budget do I need to spend to get "connected"... $50 for the cell phone, $50 for the cable modem/cable tv... money that would've been spent elsewhere 5 years ago.
Or how about the college students who flunk out of school because of internet addiction? Without the internet, these students probably would've still been in school. I remember freshman year (94-95) when I discovered the text irc at school. It was hard not to be tempted to skip classes because of an interesting conversation. I probably would've spent more time at the rec center or the library had I not discovered this other entertainment.
Of course I get paid to be a computer geek (like probably a majority of
If Ebay was smart, they could cash in on this. They make money for every person who sells something on Ebay. They could have their own internal spider that finds the changes in the database and doles it out, maybe once an hour to some other site that pays them to have the honor. They make money, there is less bandwidth used, and the other sites still have the option to have an ebay search on their site (although prob not realtime, but oh well).
I felt the same way until someone found out my name, birthdate, and SSN and got a cell phone in my name. No idea how they got the information, all I know is they live in my city (~1 mil people) and Airtouch Cellular figured out that it was possibly fraudular, and sent me a letter, and ended up not holding me accountable.
My point is, with information, people can do some really shady things. I have a cable modem, and I don't run any services on my win98 box, and try to hide my IP whenever possible, but who knows, bad things happen when you least expect it.
I seem to recall a court case from business legal studies course, where Johnny Carson sued a port-a-potty company for calling the company "Here's Johnny!" (get it, ha ha) Well the port-a-potty company eventually lost, and had to change their name since the average person would think it's referring to Johnny Carson and think that he's endorsing the port-a-potty company.
I think that should this go to court, that AOL has a chance of winning, on the same grounds. On the other hand, I'm just a computer geek, not a lawyer, so they could think up something totally different and AOL will lose (since they couldn't trademark their IM and "You've got Mail"...)
Well, then a company with 10,000 employees could feasibly get 10,001 domain names anyways, plus any foreign ones. (As long as those employees didn't want a domain name of their own...)
I have a home intranet, and all my computers can access the internet and only have one IP address assigned to me. They just go through the proxy, and the proxy routes the traffic to the correct recipient. It doesn't matter that the internal IP addresses are more than likely the same as someone else's IP because no one else sees it but the proxy server. Why would your company need more than a minimal number of IP addresses, unless you want every box on your network directly connected to the internet?
The y2k problem was a known problem with a known date, yet so many companies are waiting till the last minute to do anything about it. I think that this will be the same with the "running out of IPs" problem. If the forecasted date of sometime in 2010 is true, then I bet come late 2009, people will be frantically trying to think of a quick solution. That's just how people are, anything that requires added cost, will be done as late as possible. Hell, the oil reserves are supposed to run out in 30 years (AFAIK) and what are we doing about it now? Not a whole hell of a lot.
As for toasters,cars,coffeepots, all having their own IPs... I can see it happening with cars. Think about it, your car has a computer inside it that monitors the system, and -today- you can take your car into a mechanic, and with their own kind of computer, can hook up with your car's computer and find out what is wrong. I bet that in the near future, cars will have IPs, so that they can remotely talk to the mechanics' computers. And while we're at it, have a thing, where if someone steals your car, they can find out where the IP is located at. There are a hell of a lot of cars on the planet, aren't there?
And then there is the connectivity of cell phones, PDAs, people having dedicated lines to their computers in their home (eg. cable modems - connected all the time, so always have an IP). You have to remember that the IPs are not just for the USA, but for the rest of the world as well... the LDCs are beginning to be more connected, and as this develops, more IPs will be needed. With 6 billion people, if even half of them had at least one device that had an IP, it's easy to see that the 4 billion limit can run out very quickly.
It's going to eventually be like the area code problem, and have to punch in 10 digit numbers for local calls. Gawd, hopefully they won't run out of area codes...
I think that this will catch on, and here's why. Think of all the revenue that Adobe and MS and other software companies lose to people copying the software. They copy it because it's not all that hard to, and the software costs $300-$700 a copy. Most casual users don't want to pay that kind of money for a quality program when they don't use it more than once or twice a week (if that). Imagine an application service provider that has "lean" versions with all the capabilities of the larger copy (maybe only dl the tool when you use it, and then cache it or something), that you can't just copy onto your hard drive and use. Perhaps you sign up to this app serv prov (ASP) for say, $10-$20/mo and can use any of oodles of quality programs. If you use Photoshop, then the ASP gives a certain % or $ amt to Adobe. The software vendors make $ from it, the customer can have a choice of software they wouldn't be able to (legally) otherwise. The "power users" are the ones who generally buy the copy anyways, probably wouldn't opt for this. Maybe as an option to the service, you could choose to save what you make on the server or on your hard drive. If you need to access it somewhere else, then maybe leave it on the server temporarily. Yeah, there are some bugs (like how to stop people from passing the password to one account around) but those are the intricacies for the programmers to figure out. :) I prefer to keep my email on a server rather than on my local hard drive. There always comes a time where I have some info in my mailbox (saved or inbox) that I need to access, and wouldn't you know, I've got my laptop and not on my desktop, or I'm at a friend's house. Anything business related is on the company's server behind the firewall (which we use IMAP so it's always on the server, and with Iplanet, is accessible from anywhere, securely). Just because one "free" email service has a security hole doesn't mean that all internet services that store data are insecure.
I don't know of any high end computer systems vendors who post their prices on the web. They will usually have a "book" value, and then if you buy so much per year, you'll get some sort of discount. Buying them from resellers will also get you a different price (because you are getting an "added value" with it).
Sun also has 140 former Star Division employees as well as the former Star Division CEO as the VP in charge of the application and webtop. I think Marco probably understands the market as well as those 140 employees.
You also forget that Sun DOES have a vested interest in Star Office. First off, it is Sun's corporate philosophy that systems be non-proprietary and open. Second is the "network is the computer" and "run anything, any time, anywhere, on any device" (Microsoft has also taken up the latter, but that is besides the point.)
80% of the traffic on the Internet runs on Sun machines, if more people start using the internet and ISPs and others have more uses for servers, Sun will make money on the deal. Sun is planning on offering Star Portal, which will be able to be used on the thin-client model. Thin clients run well on what... Sun servers. I think that is a vested interest, don't you agree?
The Sun and Netscape alliance has the Iplanet offerings. The Iplanet webtop allows you to log into your corporate intranet using a browser. You don't have to dial into the company modem pool in order to use it... you could be at an internet cafe, on a cable modem, or at some other company.
Say you have a presentation. Rather than lugging a laptop to a client site, you can log into a computer at the client site, and show the presentation through the browser (via Iplanet and StarPortal). That is only one use for it. With the Star Portal being available, they will certainly sell more Iplanet products.
The answer: Yes. Many companies lease computers for a couple years, then get new ones. Letting the leases expire and instead "upgrading" to a thin client (which costs MUCH less in hardware AND in support) isn't yanking out existing infrastructure, it's doing what they would do anyways. Just, upgrading to a better model. They can decrease their support staff (help desk, pc gurus) and have a couple people answering phones (for help on the "how do i..." more than why do I get a BSOD) and a person to watch over the server(s).
I can see the cable companies combining the cable modem with the tv top box (Time Warner has one that you use your remote and access the tv listings, programs your vcr, and lets you get pay per view movies, and on-screen tv listings as you change the channel) and offering the email, word processing, web surfing, etc. functionality to it. You don't even have to BUY the cable modems (at least with TW) or tv boxes these days, you rent them which is included in the monthly service. No more buying PCs for the joe schmo user. The computer becomes just another appliance.
Think of the potential revenue that will come indirectly from this. If companies like the idea of saving money by converting to a thin-client model (of a server and cheap desktops with very little support), this can help Sun's revenues significantly. Sun is a hardware vendor firstly and a software vendor secondly. Over the course of years, (through sales of support + hardware) Sun will make much more than what they paid for Star Div.
The thin client model is for the enterprise... For a company with 2000 end users in a building where everyone pretty much only uses an office application, email, and groupware, do you really need a PC where a lot of things can mess up or go wrong? A cheap thin client with no moving parts can save companies tons of money in support.
The paragraph you quoted did say that work on all new versions of Star Office will continue, including Linux and Windows versions.
As for office applications on the web, if you rarely use spreadsheets or presentations, why should you install a few hundred meg on your hard drive, if you could create something on a web page, save it/print it locally? If you use it all the time, then yeah it'd probably be better to have it on your hard drive, but for the occasional user, something web based would be perfectly sufficient.
No, you have that completely wrong. Sun bought Star Div because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to continue to develop the product, since they weren't making any money on it. Since Star Office runs on Solaris, it is a major application that helps to sell Sun's products. Sun is going to continue to develop Star Office, otherwise it may not continue to be compatible with MS Office, and that is the major reason to use Star Office. The open source is just in case someone wants to do something with the source, it's not a "hand off" to stop developing it.
This is a great step in the right direction!