May 20, 1990

LAST WEEK, Sun Microsystems announced a RISC (reduced instruction set computer) workstation. The propeller-headed crowd in attendance ran its hand over the new SPARCstation SLC’s impressive price-performance curve with the same kind of reverence that a certain kind of person uses when caressing a Ferrari.

The cleverly designed SLC lists at $4995, a perfectly respectable price for a PC with a traditional processor like Intel’s 80386 or Motorola’s 68030, but really cheap for a RISC-based workstation. Thus Sun believes the SLC can actually compete with personal computers, a market more punishing in its own way than Sun’s traditional engineering workstation turf.

But Sun has two big problems to solve before it can shoulder its way into the PC market — its own corporate mindset, and how it burrows its way into the PC community.
Mindset is really the crux of the matter. Having achieved great success by addressing the world’s most sophisticated computer users — engineers and scientists — it’s apparently hard for Sun to imagine that the PC market could be anything but a piece o’ cake.

Sun’s users traditionally clamor for progressively cheaper computers that crunch numbers progressively faster, and run fast as lightning over a network. They don’t much care about anything else — they’re engineers, after all. If they want a piece of software to do something it doesn’t already do, they’ll just buy the rights to hack away at the source code themselves.

Sun’s president and CEO Scott McNealy believes that PC users will behave in basically the same way toward the SLC, once they get their hands on one — programmers inside corporations will buy them to develop custom software, and their joy will be so contagious that SLC purchases will spread through the corporation like a drop of ink in water, all the way up to the front desk.

A similar approach worked for Apple Computer with the Macintosh, but in 1984 the Macintosh had something truly unique to offer — a graphical user interface (GUI) that made working with a computer an intuitive task. Today’s proliferation of GUIs makes this a much more iffy proposition.

And yes, just like any PC company, Sun has its very own GUI, called “Open Look.” But Open Look itself is another sign of Sun’s “piece o’ cake” approach to the PC market. It may be “open,” since it runs on plain old Unix, and yes, you can look at it, but it comes across as not much more than some file-folder icons slapped on the screen with the arcane Unix command-line stuff right underneath it. Open Look will not help Sun come one centimeter closer to winning a GUI war in the PC industry.

In its own familiar world, Sun’s had the right idea for a long time. Its philosophy of “open systems” — the ability to run an industry-standard operating system over an industry-standard network like Ethernet, granting access to other computer systems via its own industry-standard network software — made it the darling of users who appreciate getting their needs met. And Sun’s slogan, “The Network Is The Computer,” is closer to being true today than when it launched that particular ad campaign in 1985.

But I’d be hard pressed to come up with another company that works harder at gratuitous macho posturing than Sun. Throughout the presentations during Tuesday’s rollout, McNealy and his marketing cohort Ed Zander poked and gibed at the competition, from stuttering and giggling over the names “M-M-M-Microsoft” and “M-M-M-Mips” Computer Systems, to haughty sarcasm over NeXT’s machine.

Sun’s going to have to lose this attitude if it wants to dent the PC market. Instead of creating animosity with its competitors, Sun should be doing what other PC vendors have found to be successful: actively soliciting software developers and in the process, creating the next level of sophisticated PC software.

Sun will shriek when it reads this. PR-types handed out a 15-pound-plus book on Tuesday, detailing some 2000 SPARC-based hardware and software products from outside vendors. And yes, Martha, there are word processors, spreadsheets and databases contained therein.

But this stuff is no big deal anymore. Why bother to put the power of RISC on the desktops of corporate America and beyond, if you’re just going to hand them Lotus 1-2-3? With a growing population interested in practical applications for such things as interactive media and telecommunications, Sun’s team has to actively find developers with the imagination to move beyond plain-vanilla PC applications. then they have to find a more useful way to communicate what they’ve got when they’ve got it.