View
from the Hill Re: Desktop SPARC systems
In the early 1990's
you'd be surprised how many companies marketed SPARC workstations. The large
number of market entrants was fuelled by business plans which suggested that
this market would be like the PC market, with no single company getting more
than 10% market share.
However, Sun Microsystems proved to be better
at marketing than most of these wannabe SPARC workstation vendors, and so names
like Solbourne, Axil Computer, HAL Computer and Ross Technology etc got
consigned to the dustbin of history.
An added complication was that
the performance of Intel Architecture PC's continued to rise, and by 2001, the
quarterly shipments of SPARC workstations were not only declining in market
share terms, but also in absolute unit quantities. You wouldn't know this, if
you relied on reading Sun's cleverly crafted press releases, which continued
proclaiming that they were getting increased market share, even while their unit
quantities were going down...
Although this product category will
survive in special applications areas like EDA, and software development for
SPARC servers, Sun's vaunted hope of stealing the desktop market away from
Wintel was never a serious prospect to anyone who didn't work for the company.
Sun's key strength was, and remains, servers.
In contrast to the
desktop, the SPARC portable market continues to show strong growth. That's a
product area in which Sun has never been successful with its own products. But
Sun is a significant reseller of SPARC notebooks.
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Snapshots from SPARC desktop
history
click below to see archived versions of our SPARC
workstation directory pages |
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Sun/SPARC Resellers in
the USA
Sun/SPARC Resellers in
the UK
