Sun makes government pitch

Sun Microsystems Inc.'s products are ideal for government, but the company is finding rival Microsoft Corp.'s hold hard to break, said Scott McNealy, Sun's chairman, president and chief executive officer.

McNealy, in a keynote speech at the FOSE trade show in Washington, D.C., and during a brief press conference, outlined the reasons that agencies should consider Sun's Unix and Java-based products. For one, he said, there are no Java viruses. "It's not because there's not an installed base," he said. "It's because nobody's figured out how to write a Java virus."

Sun's products can run on the same Intel Corp. processor systems that Microsoft's products use, he said, but aren't limited to Intel. The only strong competitor to Sun's Java-based Web services is Microsoft's "welded-shut, single-vendor, Intel-based" .NET offering, said McNealy, who has been one of Microsoft's most vocal critics for years.

Dendy Young, chairman and CEO at GTSI Corp., joined McNealy for a press conference after the keynote and echoed the Sun message.

"People don't yet understand the power of the Solaris desktop," he said. "It's not yet common enough."

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