Sun+Mercury = Pluto?

Cringley posts about a new Sun initiative called Project Mercury:

“It’s about an SMI wide initiative called Project Mercury – which allows us to *lower* the price of our products to customers who agree to subscribe to Sun’s service offerings. (Just like when you buy a cell phone in a shopping mall – sign up for service, you can even get the phone for free). Lower prices mean more demand, higher service attach means more margin and predictability (both prized by shareholders). At an SMI or systems level (vs. a component sale), Mercury improves our business model.”

Basically, Sun is hoping to forgo hardware revenues in return for service contracts. It’s an interesting effort a la PeoplePC for enterprises. But one has to wonder if this is it for Sun – an all or nothing game. In the end, maybe a year or two from now, I believe Sun will be hotly fought over property among private equity firms (if that Apple rumor doesnt pan out!)

And just for the hell of it

MSFT v GOOG v AAPL

Total Cost of Vista

Despite Microsoft’s considerable PR efforts, the negativity around Vista just keeps growing. Missed deadlines, lost features, mediocre reviews of preview releases, more lost features, no compelling reasons to upgrade, and now, questions from corporate users about TCO. Mary Jo Foley from MicrosoftWatch:

One enterprise user, who asked not to be named, recently posed an interesting question to me (via instant-messaging), regarding how Microsoft is expecting to make a business case for Vista.

MR. Biz: how are they going to make a business case for Vista?
MJF: that’s a good question…. I’m not really sure
MR. Biz: no matter how much tweaking MS does, it’s still not going to solve the resource requirements issue
MR. Biz: the 3D desktop should have been part of Plus
MR. Biz: vista will NEVER run on a $1000 PC
MR. Biz: EVER
MR. Biz: maybe a $1500 PC, but that one doesn’t exist Yet
MR. Biz: there aren’t cheap dual cores yet
MR. Biz: price point is still around $2000
MJF: u are right
MR. Biz: basic users don’t need this
MR. Biz: corporate users don’t need this
MR. Biz: the corps are gonna scream bloody Murder
MR. Biz: they can’t afford to put $2000+ desktops on each desk
MR. Biz: and buy all new copies of office to run on It
MR. Biz: what we’re talking about is a TCO of about $3000 per desktop
MR. Biz: maybe even more than that
MR. Biz: that’s before support costs
MR. Biz: that’s just the damn software and hardware
MR. Biz: even if they leave the server infrastructure the same
MR. Biz: which really, they can’t
MR. Biz: so I bet its more like $5000 a desktop
MR. Biz: never before has a windows release required such a major pill to swallow
MJF: good points

Vista has to prove that the security concerns are really tackled this time around. Information Week survey results show that corporations are tired of the security merry-go-around:

Security problems continue to dog Windows, four years after Microsoft revamped its entire engineering process to prevent leaky Microsoft code from dragging down its customers’ data centers–and Microsoft’s reputation. But the bug fixes are still coming fast and furious. Just last month, Microsoft patched 23 vulnerabilities in Windows and Office, flagging 16 with its most critical rating.

Side question: with OneCare service subscriptions rising, is there an incentive to really solve the security nightmare?

Let’s not forget the slew of lawsuits concerning Vista and (former?) Microsoft partners: Symantec v Microsoft and Adobe v Microsoft. Add it all up and you get this typical reaction from analysts:

Jason Maynard, a research analyst at Credit Suisse, said in a recent report that he’s “skeptical about the impact from Vista, simply given the fact that so many of the exciting productivity and entertainment services reside on the Web, not in the PC operating system.”

The question remains whether anyone (Apple?) can really benefit from all the issues facing Microsoft or is all this complaining just much ado about nothing until Vista and the inevitable marketing onslaught arrives sometime, oh, I don’t know, in March 2007 (also, will anyone care by that time)?

[Update 1] The Pravda of Microsoft, C|Net, pays glorious tribute to Microsoft by announcing the Vista release candidate 1 as ready for almost production.

[Update 2] CRN says release candidate 1 is not all that ready:

RC1 is in the best shape of anything they have shipped for Vista, but in the old nomenclature I would call this at best a Beta Three and not a Release Candidate One,” said Mike Cherry, lead Windows analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a newsletter in Kirkland, Wash.

Business 2.0 delivers a one-two knock-out punch:

The modest expectations for Vista do give rise to a radical question: How many tens of thousands of engineers might Microsoft have fired, and how many billions of dollars might it have saved if it had just not bothered to develop Vista in the first place? Most of us would have kept buying Windows anyway

True. What’s B2’s recommendation?

So here’s a modest proposal: Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC around. Don’t buy a new one. That’s the only way we have to let Microsoft know Vista is an overhyped, late, and pointless update to XP – a perfectly fine operating system.

South Park v RIAA

Round 6: Apple v Microsoft

24/7 Wall Street covers the renewed Apple v Microsoft competition:

The Zune does have an 802.11 WiFi connection, and that is very important. The FCC filing says that the Zune will be able to share photos, songs and albums with up to four other devices. And, it is built in. No attachments or new gear has to be added to make it work. That will be important. It may be the Achilles heel of the iPod.”

Two words: battery strength. Wifi draws a lot of power so unless Microsoft or Toshiba has come up with some as yet unknown workaround, the battery will need recharging every 30-45 minutes.

And this just adds to it (size and battery strength why Apple switched to Flash memory except in their high-end line):

The Zune also has a 30-gigabit hard drive which is pretty impressive.

But this sounds just about right:

The Zune has an FM tuner. It is hard to say why. Maybe Microsoft believes that people will start to listen to the radio like they did in the 1970s and 1980s.