Customers are paying up to 10 times what they should to buy and run computers, but a correction will come soon, according to Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy.
"The world has to be getting a little disappointed in our industry," McNealy said on Tuesday, addressing attendees of the company's SunNetwork conference. "We are overcharging in our industry by an order of magnitude," or by up to 10 times, he said. "That cost...is going to come out of our industry in the next five to 10 years."
The companies that will be hit when computer prices fall to their proper level are the ones that have a vested interest in maintaining today's complicated computing environments, McNealy told reporters after his keynote address. He gave IBM and Microsoft as examples. "How much of IBM Global Service's revenue (comes from) maintaining the complexity of the PC environment?" he asked.
McNealy, with his fondness for car metaphors, had one ready for the occasion. If cars were as complicated and custom-built as today's computing gear, there would be vastly more mechanics, car painters, tow truck drivers, car designers and other support workers needed to deal with the chaos and unpredictability, he said.
Sun believes it has the answer to the problem: customers should buy collections of hardware and software already assembled and suited to the task at hand, and they should run multiple tasks on those systems to ensure computing capacity isn't going unused.
As expected, Sun detailed its push to profit from simplification on Tuesday, unveiling pricing for its Java Enterprise System bundle of server software. It also released price details for Java Desktop System, its Linux-based rival to Microsoft Windows and Office.
Does Mr McNealy really think computers are too expensive?
Migrating to Sun won't help any of my customers as there are no applications to suit my customers for their operating systems and never will there be any!
Great news Mr McNealy, PC's to drop to $199. Does anyone really think that thats where the market should be for the best piece of technology in the last 200 years? Will more people buy them at this price? No vendor
anywhere will be able to supply products to suit this PC. the costs to deliver are too high
Sun would do better to come up with fair competitive products for us all to use on whatever platform rather than just crowing about technology being too expensive.
If we are to use his analogy, why aren't cars $500?