And Sun's answer to that problem, unsurprisingly, is to get customers to buy everything from them.
Sun's partnership with Oracle, and its support for Oracle's "Grid" architecture was reinforced by McNealy with the words 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend." After that it was all about plane and auto parts. In one of McNealy's many transportation-oriented analogies, he portrayed the industry as a world of companies with each having decided to build its own hangar, and then go on to build a "jalopy" plane using components procured from a multitude of different suppliers.
Comparing the prices of a Dell and Sun blade, McNealy said "If you want a 'piston ring', we'll ship you one . . . cheaper than Dell.
"But instead of building a custom airplane out of parts from 80 different component vendors, we want you to buy the whole airplane, or better yet, a seat on the airplane," McNealy said.
Sun showed a collection of blades in a rack -- a "grid", connected with a 10Gb InfiniBand fabric, and pre-configured with a pre-release version of Oracle's just-announced 10g database software. "We will sell you a bundle like this, in what I call a 'slab' . . . and configure and tune it to meet your needs."
A big part of the value-add Sun brings is its reference architecture and ability to do testing.
If customers are putting together their own jalopies, MacNealy said, the burden of configuring and performing regression testing each time something changes or replaced is too great to be feasible. The situation arises where regression testing consists of "Let's fly it and see if it crashes."
The justification for buying value-added packages from Sun, according to McNealy, is in the fact that you could probably buy all the parts that go into building a car for less than buying a complete car, but when yo factor in all the time and labor headaches of assembly, it works out cheaper to buy the ready-made item.
