Sun Microsystems Inc has shaken the competition with the Sparcstation 10s, and Hewlett-Packard Co vice-president Lew Platt has confided to Wall Street analysts that the company will respond by introducing Snake workstations and upgrades run by its Precision Architecture RISC 7100 chip, Thunderbird, by late summer and will start delivering them before its fiscal year closes in October. There appears to be some internal debate going on down in Palo Alto about how much damage Sun Microsystems Inc’s recent Sparcstation 10 announcement is doing to its own workstation efforts. Hewlett-Packard seems to have at least a couple of options: an immediate Thunderbird response, levelling the playing field with Sun right now – with ships in October – or a big splash in the autumn, with the ability to make immediate deliveries of the souped-up machines.
