Sun Microsystems Inc chief executive Scott McNealy is never at a loss for something to say, and has been sounding off about some of the current bees in his bonnet. He says he’s sick and tired of the press Intel Corp’s getting about chips it can’t deliver. Sun too has chips in development, he says – seven of them in fact. So McNealy says he’s going to put his people on a road show to compare vapourchips to vapourchips. Among the ones they’re likely to tout are the MicroSparc 2, 3 and 4 that they are working on. The current Tsunami run meanwhile is said to be exceeding expectations in speed and yield. On the software side, SunSoft Inc has been secretly working on writing a Microsoft Corp Windows application programming interface in a clean room so as to avoid the possibility of copyright infringement lawsuits, so that Solaris will be able to run a copy of Excel, let’s say, bought from high street software shop. Being a man of a few select words, Scott McNealy claims it works good and runs fast. Logically, it’s called WAPI. McNealy told Wall Street analysts last week that Sun has more 50MHz Vikings than it knows what to do with and that Texas Instruments Inc could bury Sun in the chips if Sun would let it. Actual quantities, which exceed internal expectations of only a month ago, boil down to between 100,000 and 200,000 units a quarter, which in turn means that by the end of the current quarter Sun expects to be able to fill all the back orders it has for Model 41 Sparcstation 10s plus the orders it receives in the intervening weeks. McNealy also said that the hard-won 45MHz and 50MHz versions of the Viking, also known as SuperSparc, would be abundant by the end of the second quarter, thanks to a third iteration of the masks. Silicon availability has McNealy bragging that Sun will have more multiprocessing servers out with customers by the end of this year than all the rest of the industry combined in the history of the world. On Microsoft’s Windows New Technology, the Sun chief told Wall Street last week that he reckoned it’ll be a long time before information managers start drinking that Kool-Aid.
