Hardware will be free: Sun

p2pnet.net News:- Soon, hardare won't cost anything - as long as you subscribe to bundled software and multi-year services offerings, says Sun Systems' new president and ceo Jonathan Schwartz.

"In our world, you will subscribe to the software and the hardware is free," he's quoted as saying in a Reuters story here. "Directionally, our expectation is that in fiscal 2005 you're going to see a rapid departure from selling hardware, software and services apart."

Nor, the Reuters report goes on, is Schwartz alone, pointing out that Microsoft's Bill Gates has said he believes that, within a few years, hardware will be free and will be bought on a subscription basis, rather than as a one-time purchase that must be upgraded routinely.

"Bill Gates and I agree that within four to five years hardware will be free," Schwartz told Reuters, who was to outline Sun's belief at a Sun conference in Shanghai that the network - the hardware, software, storage and its interlinks - is fast becoming a commodity.

On its web page here, Sun introduces more than 30 innovations inlcuding "the industry's only self-healing, self-managing OS file system, Dynamic File System".


cont'D....