"Taking a 5+ year, multibillion dollar gamble on being able
to totally reboot Sun's SPARC design team would be pretty
gutsy given how diminished SPARC would be in the market
by the time new products could reach customers. "
That's my point. This announcement of 2000 new hires of Engineers and Salesmen for SPARC is just smoke and mirrors.
Larry is not going to spend a dime on any new R&D. He is just going to let SPARC twist slowly in the wind while throwing shedloads of software engineers at the captive base to charge anybody dumb enough not to bite the bullet, and make the conversion to non-sparc.
This creates the appearance of competition to Microsoft OS/DB integration and will create huge bad will over time, but this would fit Larry's MO to a Tee. :) Damn the torpedos! A shark suffocates if it stops swimming, ya know. :)
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