Suns and AI, an article FYI

[Doug Roberts]

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.

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Douglas Roberts                |
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