roberts@studguppy.lanl.gov (Doug Roberts) (11/02/89)
The following paragraph is excerpted from page 4 the September, 1989 Spang Robinson Report on Artificial Intelligence, Vol 5, No.9. It is reproduced here without permission... [C]ompanies such as IBM, Sun, Apple, and Hewlett Packard are still groping around [the AI] issue. These companies now simply respond to customer demand without demonstrating a clear direction for AI. And from page 6 Sun Microsystems of Mountain View, CA has traditionally claimed that five percent of revenues come from AI-related sales. Carl Wolf, previously president of Gold Hill which markets expert system tools, is quick to refer to a Dataquest report stating that 61 percent of workstations bought for AI use are Sun's. However, when it comes to the role of AI in computing, Sun has nowhere the the definitive vision of DEC or TI. Wolf would probably say this doesn't matter because Sun is winning workstation sales in AI anyway. Management's goal is to offer in their third party program any and all AI tools that exist because they do not want to guess about customer's needs and then to sell as much hardware as possible. This is typical of the volume-based mentality characteristic of young companies. Sun does not appear to be using AI strategically to improve the computing experience. As more competitive SPARC-based hardware becomes available on Sun's UNIX marked, Sun will undoubtedly begin to falter in the numbers game. As a long-time user of Sun's Lisp (~3 years, about as long as Sun has been marketing AI software) I'd have to agree that I haven't seen any evidence of a clear plan to capture the AI Unix market. Half of our people here in my group are still developing on Symbolics machines, because of their superior Lisp environment. ================================================================ Douglas Roberts | Los Alamos National Laboratory |When choosing between two evils, Box 1663, MS F-602 |I always like to try the one Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545 |I've never tried before. (505)667-4569 | dzzr@lanl.gov | ================================================================