“… with Microsoft Corp. While it’s doubtful that either company will be able to unseat Windows’ monopoly status in the PC market, you’ve got to admire their pluck. Sun Microsystems Inc.’s attack on Microsoft’s desktop fortress is called Project Mad Hatter and uses Linux combined with StarOffice and other open-source goodies. Although most of the attention has been given to Sun’s embrace of Linux and open source, the real story is about hardware.” Read the article at ComputerWorld.
Sun, Apple Ignite New Desktop Skirmish …
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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So what is the point?
Is he just pointing out what makes Sun/Apple different?
This just looks like something smashed together to make a deadline
Quote from the article
>>Thomas Cunningham, CEO of Baltimore-based Alabanza Corp., says he’d consider returning to Solaris “if the hardware were less expensive.” His company uses 1,000 Intel-based Linux servers in its Web hosting center, which he ran for three years on Sun systems until the costs got out of hand. Cunningham prefers Solaris because the performance is better.<<
Apparently, Mr. Cunningham hasn’t used Solaris on x86. I’ve found that both Solaris 8 and 9 are dog slow on decent x86 hardware – even compared to Windows Server 2003.
Apparently, Mr. Cunningham hasn’t used Solaris on x86.
the article doesn’t imply that he used Solaris on x86.
The article is refering to the Mad Hatter Project, which is nothing but “Red Hat Linux 9+” plus “Sun Hardware”, sold to the Sun clients in USA, in enterprises and big corporations. The “corporate desktop” initiative by Sun does not evolve Solaris.
Technologically, Solaris is incredible. It had awesome technology (kernel preemption, advanced memory managers, etc) back when Win95 could barely handle running in protected mode. Further, Sun published a lot of information about the internals, and as a result, people could actually use their advancements in their own OS designs. For example, on of the main memory allocators in the Linux kernel is derived from a paper by Sun on their slab allocator. The x86 port is very badly optimized, but that says nothing about Solaris where it was meant to be, on Sun hardware.
Solaris is the coolest name for an OS. Ever. It’s so cool, they even made a movie with the same name
That movie is based on a novel under that same name by Stanis³aw Lem and has nothing to do with Sun’s OS (and novel was written probably much earlier before Sun’s OS). Also there is a russian movie based on that novel, older than hollywood version.
And yes, it’s a kewl word
And what kind of desktop can we expect from sun? They are not a desktop company, never have been. Heck, CDE might have been designed by an elephant for all I know.
I like Sun, but in all honesty I do feel that operating systems like linux are becoming a better choice for many purposes. However, I think Sun’s other new initiative with trusted solaris shows some pretty interesting potential: http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/trustedsolaris/. This is the stuff the American government uses, and apparently they’ve been using it for at least 10 years. Hey, if they’re using it, it obviously cannot be bad….
I knew that. The “:)” (at least down here in Georgia
implies a joke 
Neither one will displace Microsoft, they may keep the current marketshare they have but I dont forsee them getting any kind of significant marketshare in the future, Sun may gain some more ground with its Linux desktop but IMHO the ” shock and awe ” effect that followed Mac OS X after its incarnation has pretty much died.
That Sun recently announced that its dropping its Mad Hatter project in favor of commercially available linux OSes… apparently they want to avoid duplication since there are so many distributions out there already.
> That Sun recently announced that its dropping its Mad Hatter project in favor of commercially available linux OSes.
No, you have it confused with Sun Linux. What Sun dropped was its OWN Linux flavor, called ‘Sun Linux’. What Sun is continuing, is Mad Hatter, which is “Red Hat 9” + “Sun Hardware” to sell to their existing clients.
> No, you have it confused with Sun Linux. What Sun dropped was its OWN Linux flavor, called ‘Sun Linux’. What Sun is continuing, is Mad Hatter, which is “Red Hat 9” + “Sun Hardware” to sell to their existing clients.
must have my facts wrong then…
AppleWorks, though a fine bundle of software, is more like MS Works than any kind of replacement for MS Office. To say you could replace MS Office with AppleWorks is a joke. Even among us Mac users.
And what kind of desktop can we expect from sun? They are not a desktop company, never have been.
Sun made much of their money in the desktop market initially, selling Scientific/Engineering Workstations.
Thomas Cunningham, CEO of Baltimore-based Alabanza Corp., says he’d consider returning to Solaris “if the hardware were less expensive.” His company uses 1,000 Intel-based Linux servers in its Web hosting center, which he ran for three years on Sun systems until the costs got out of hand. Cunningham prefers Solaris because the performance is better.
These sort of environments are what the UltraSPARC IV & V were designed for. Hopefully the cost reduction from a single multicore processor supporting SMT (plus the performance advantages of cache coherency) will be able to outweigh the cost of the processor itself and the encompassing hardware when compared with dozens of independent x86 systems.
Sun Microsystems Inc.’s attack on Microsoft’s desktop fortress is called Project Mad Hatter and uses Linux combined with StarOffice and other open-source goodies.
Why Sun continues to push StarOffice over OO.o is beyond me. The rate at which changes are integrated back into the StarOffice codebase is depressing. StarOffice is far from polished. I think Sun should simply stop maintaining their own codebase, and instead periodically fork/rebrand OO.o into StarOffice periodically ala Netscape 6/7.
Sun can’t really hope to compete on the desktop with Microsoft. They can push Sunray thin clients versus Windows “thick clients” if they provide a financing model which makes them competative from a pricing standpoint (which they certainly aren’t now… they cost as much or more than a full x86 desktop system)
I can’t believe he said it. A Mac is not an island without MS Office. If MS stopped making it’s Mac version it wouldn’t make one bit of difference. There are so many alternatives. Why do PC people think that the world revolves around Office, please. OOH, I need an e-mail client with a calendar, whoopty-doo. They can take that friggin paperclip guy and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
I agree with dggraphics. I understand WORD is pretty good. Prolly has 1750 features but I just use one… PUTTING WORDS ON PAPER.
I agree as well. Saying the Mac is a successful platform because it sports a crufty port of MS Office is a joke. The Mac is a successful platform because it’s an all-in-one solution coming from a company dedicated to good, simple UI design and selling to a loyal fanbase.
The reason why the presence of Office is significant is compatibility, nothing more ; let’s face it, practically no one has come up with an alternative that’s capable of loading/saving the office formats 100% perfectly. As long as such an alternative doesn’t exist, corporate userbases at least will not be interested unless there’s a (reasonably) up to date Office port available. Admittedly the corporate market doesn’t generally form the core of Apple’s business, but it’s significant enough that it falls under consideration regardless.
Umm.. when was Keynote announced? When did we realise that Apple users don’t exactly support Office?
This article looks like it should’ve been published months ago. Did somebody have a rushed deadline…. I think so.
Not to troll, but what exactly was the point of this article and why did you recommend that we read it?
This is one of Eugenia’s post, to the moderated **cough** censored section I go.
MS has become too greedy and too onerous for their own good. They have opened the door. I hope that sun and apple can capitalize on that but from where i stand it looks like the only vendors that are benefitting from it are linux shops.
However, Sun and apple may pleasantly surprise me yet.
Look, some ppl have made it clear that they don’t want windows bashing…
but its this sort of purposely inflammotary articles that start it off anyway.
> Heck, CDE might have been designed by an elephant for all I know.
LOL! 😀 (I have been “forced” to use Solaris with CDE and have no nice memories from it)
There is always the debate of Apple vs. MS and now Linux.
Mac OS X is great. It blows aways anything I have seen from MS – I know this isnt say much, but most end users do not have a clue. Really – if they did there would be more Mac users. Linux is great and all… and I think it is almost there, but it does not have the support or ease of use for regular RETAIL end users. You do not really need MS Office for most things.
Apple has included a nice RTF editor that can handle most lettering. There is of course AppleWorks with its simple layout. Many Macs are bundled with Quick Books for database/money management and of course there is not Keynote that can handle PPT file fairly easily from what I’ve seen. Excel is a nice spreadsheet option, but MS Access is mostly junk – unless you have a small DB you want to setup – and in that case FileMakerPro is much better since it is not restricted to Winders and even though Access runs on Windows it really blows as no version of Access is forward or backward compatible with any other version (or so it seems).
Apple has always been lacking in the DB department – simply because the graphical OS was never designed to run high end DB processes. With X this all changes and many vendors are moving over to X or expanding to X. SQL and others I can not remember because I should really be sleeping…
Apple’s big advantage now is that it has Office in X now and Apple has a better more consistant GUI than Linux. Apple is pushing into digitial video and enterprise servers (for medium and smaller companies). So it can do very well and expand its markets… there are around 25 million Mac users out there with all the incentive in the world to switch to monopoly soft. There must be a good reason for them to stay with Apple.