Sun's Last Stand 553
non writes "Wired has an article by Gary Revlin in the July edition about the current state of affairs at Sun. He attributes half of Sun's problems to failure to recognize the emergence of Linux, and the other half to their failure to make up with Microsoft, and finishes up with a server price comparison. An interesting read."
Linux's uptimes approaching Solaris' (Score:5, Interesting)
Scalability and cost (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest argument for converting servers to smaller x86 boxes has been scalability and cost. Linux is a popular way to do that, but many companies have been using various BSD variants as well because they are more comfortable with server vs. desktop oriented software. Sun will do very well in those areas with their new emphasis.
For a company that wants to keep their big hardware on Solaris for some stuff, it makes a lot of sense to standardize on Solaris for their cheap x86 servers as well.
how do they account for Sun over taking IBM (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sun Doesn't appeal to me (Score:5, Interesting)
but, you're still not going to convince a large, lumbering manufacturing company running decidely unsexy applications to switch to linux. i've worked with a number of clients that couldn't switch from solaris even if they wanted to, because their apps just don't exist for linux (think erp/mrp systems).
plus, if you need lots of processing power, you can certainly set up a cluster of cheap lintel boxes, but why spend the time/money on that when you could just throw an enterprise server in there, and just have it work?
Could there be a lesson for Open Source here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Focusing on beating Microsoft in any way possible might actually *not* be as effective as innovating and creating products people want to use.
Sun's anti-MS strategy was quite interesting (e.g. it was quite a bit more innovative than just reimplementing the GUI part of windows on top of a big teetering stack of different projects
Sun is dead in the water (Score:5, Interesting)
Sun needs to figure out a business model that will work in the new economic reality. They will either need to be a software company or a hardware one. But like a lot of companies they will probably die off because they couldn't adapt. They were successful once because they filled a market need, but when the market changed they couldn't adapt fast enough.
Ironically (Score:1, Interesting)
This should be modded off the front page.
Re:RTFA (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Priceless... (Score:3, Interesting)
...and you'd probably be running Solaris 9 on it nowadays, not Solaris 8.
Re:Priceless... (Score:3, Interesting)
I personally believe much of Linux's rapid acceptance for large-scale computing needs is due to the very fact IBM big iron hardware can run Linux easily today.
What galls Sun quite a lot is the fact IBM's own development tools for Java are vastly preferred over Sun's own development tools. I think IBM should just buy out Java from Sun and save developers a lot of grief. =)
What reality do these people live in? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where is really matters (big database engines, 4+ CPUs, a lot of external storage) Linux/Intel is just not capable of the task. Sun plainly does not have much competition there. At least not from Linux. HP-UX, AIX -- may be (though not here).
What are these whacky analysts talking about? What Linux? 8-CPU, 64bit, fibre storage attached and Linux? Have you ever tried it? I have, I know what a pain it is. It DOES NOT FLY. Period.
What REALLY hurts Sun is Windows on the low end. Not the hardware, not the price, but all these litty-bitty apps, that do not work anywhere but on Windows. Espetially Web apps. All these moronic developers with only Windows experience and mantra "does not work -- reboot it!", "open MS-DOS command prompt window and type c:".
There is Sun's biggest problem. They are lacking in the software, not the hardware.
What's Sun's problem? (Score:1, Interesting)
They are innovative (Java), competitive (low cost Linux), open minded (open source, Linux). They have a large share of developers. They created Java. They support Linux. They make profit during the down turn of the economy.
Re:Sun Doesn't appeal to me (Score:5, Interesting)
You might be doing yourself a disservice, and maybe selling yourself short.
File structures may be different, configuring stuff in
but the diff between Solaris (or IRIX, or OS X, or AIX) and Linux isn't any wider
than variants in Linux distributions. Just running an unfamiliar shell on a Linux
box could make it seem like a foreign machine if that's not what you're used to.
What's easiest for you also might be blinding you to choosing the best box for
the task at hand. I think Solaris tends to have more "torque" under load than
Linux, OS X is better at interoperability with other systems, and IRIX...well, no comment.
There's also the factor of uptime and service contract support. If you spend the bucks,
when a Sun box breaks, they'll get things back in order quickly. Sure you could run
down to Best Buy and get parts for your Linux box, but some places feel uncomfortable
with that, as they should.
Not that I like Sun all that much. They could use some of the modern polish that
Apple has put into OS X. Sun maintenance and installation feels very dated to me.
But they do run and run and run and most anything Linux can do, in the server world,
can be done (often better) with Solaris.
Netcraft can't measure above 497 days... (Score:3, Interesting)
The *BSD boxes don't have that limitation, it seems.
I wonder how many boxes are out there where this 497-day counter has "rolled over", and if this figure is accurate given that limitation?
Apple Needs a Little Sun To Grow (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple would also gain Java as an Apple supported program and language. It would help better, faster Java come to Linux and OSX. Java could be more tightly integrated into Quicktime and thus into mobile phones [com.com] where Apple is implementing it's latest builds of Quicktime.
Re:For payback (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun is good for one thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Beyond that, I'm not sure what Sun machine's are good for.
Re:Apple Needs a Little Sun To Grow (Score:3, Interesting)
The article misses a few things as well. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Baby Bells used their last mile monopoly to kill the "dot com" folks. The bandwith demands have grown, but not like they could have and they are concentrated in far fewer hands. This has made a glut of Sun equipment. A friend of mine bought and ultra spark, which once sold for $10,000, for less than the price of a high end home computer. There's no way he would have gotten his hands on a deal like that if a healthy and free internet market was working. Bad laws, such as those preventing me from buying California wine, and preventing me from running servers on my cable modem, have also played a part. Established interests are shining triumphant and we all suffer for it.
Microsoft has also harmed Sun's traditional scientific computing business. Microsoft has done much to blow up X compatibility and make communications with Unix difficult. One of the responses has been to move some of the calculations to M$/Intel platforms. This obviously does not work for all calcs, but consider the losses from 3D CAD and a perpetuation of the M$ as a client model. Linux can be a great aid there, so long as scientists and engineers revolt against the M$ Office lockin. They have only to realize that the pain is comming from one location and move on. Most have, but many are loath to move on yet. The support infrasturcture for free software is still growing.
In the end, Sun has much to offer. Their hardeare is first rate and they can embrace free software at any time.
the problem isn't attracting them -- (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to interview at their brand new (at the time) Burlington, MA facility and I was simply amazed at the place; the facilities, the people and the atmosphere was so key in my going to work there (as was the salary they offered). I still think it's a great place to work, especially for people in my age group (I'm 25) who grew up getting used to flex time. That I could take a long lunch, play a few rounds of foosball and go to the gym at 4 in the afternoon made me a happy camper.
The problems began when I started sensing I ought to be moving up (or at least, around) in the company. I started in a position I liked but didn't want to stay in for more than a year or so, and as I started to make pushes to move around I was met with stiff resistance. Management claimed it was because of the economy, but I knew people who moved around and they weren't exactly examples of people who were going to save the company.
The key to this issue was that while Sun was publicly making overtures towards attracting the younger developers, the first and second level managers were only advertising positions for senior engineers and were being very inflexible in "stretching" the job prereq's for younger engineers. I often think the only reason I got a job in the first place was because I came in during one of the last "conscription"-type expansions the company did before the IT sector did its nosedive.
To this day they still have that problem; I often consider going back to Sun because the corporate culture is fast moving, fun and flexible, and I doubt I'll find that in any other company of that size. But the jobs and the people they're hiring now are all mid- or senior-level engineers.
So actually, now that I think about it, maybe it's more apt to say their problem isn't attracting young engineers -- the culture is almost geared towards them (why else would you put foosball tables and a Starbucks in your engineering centers?). The problem is that once they've attracted the young people, they have to get their managers to hire them.
Oh Yeah They're Dead Alright (Score:4, Interesting)
They arn't selling hardware. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Where Sun Excells (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate it when people say stuff like that. It makes me think of all the money the RIAA lost last year due to piracy. I think we'd all be better off not knowing how a 48x CDRW or a 400 Mhz processor can cost us ten times the profits.
Sun has one thing going for them, reputation.
sun problems (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Java - there are too many releases and java applications seem to be too tightly tied to specific point releases. This causes huge support problems.
2. SUN supplied h/w to many of the dot.com companies. When they went bust a LOT of 2nd hand hardware appeared on the market. It's difficult to compete with your own h/w at 2nd hand prices.
(Does anybody else find that typing in the form for SlashDot submissions causes Mozilla/Redhat8 to bounce the form around the window for no apparent reason?)
Re:Java (Score:4, Interesting)
It will kill them.
Sun is proud of their "9's" - 99.999...% uptime. The truth is that 99.99% of businesses don't need that percentage. Sun is proud of their scaling, but I've got news - 99.99% of businesses don't need that much power. It's also clear that we'll hit 10Ghz machines with multiple gigs of RAM in just a few years, and they'll cost around $1K; if you want terabytes of disk it may cost around $2K. How is Sun going to compete with that?
When any Luser can buy a machine that competes rather well with a Sun box, and can install any amount of easy software instead of Sun's pain in the ass stuff...
RIP Sun
<rant off>
Re:For payback (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun and NeXT/Apple just haven't been able to get along...
Re:Priceless... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sun hardware is unbelievable expensive. I know the many Sun Blade 1000s we have at work are $16,000+ each. And while they are pretty, the performance is nowhere near worth the price tag... even with the massive discounts we get from Sun. And those "low-priced" Sun Blade 100s for the desktop are nothing to get excited about, either.
While Sun may be hurting, and its hardware its over-priced and under-performs, there is A LOT of Sun hardware w/Solaris out there in the field... and there will continue to be. We can only shake our heads and speculate why...
Re:For payback (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly what does IBM get by buying out Sun?
* Fast RISC chips? IBM's already got them and they're incompatible.
* High Powered Unix? AIX is pretty good, and they've already set a path towards Linux, not Solaris
* Big development force? Well, there is this, though I'm sure IBM could rehire some of its folks or some Mad Skillz linux hackers that would have a more appropriate skill set.
* Tech to do massive SMP? Maybe, but they got mad Parallel processing skillz and bought Sequent out for their killer NUMA tech which scales better anyway (Shame they can't make DB2 run on it)
* 5.5 Billion in cash? Ok, this is a nice incentive :^)
What I see as far more likely is a cross OEM deal with Apple. AIX will port to Xserves and OS X will port to p640/660/680/etc real easy since they're all CHRP boxes (more or less).
Apple get proven high end servers, IBM gets quality low end "fill" servers/laptops/desktops to round out their AIX product line.
Sun will need to embrace a similar Solaris>>Linux strategy or AIX will suck market share as folks realize AIX is the best upgrade path off of Linux (less retraining and porting, more support for advanced availability, etc.)
McNealy shooting his own foot... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Yet when talk turns to Linux, it's as if McNealy can't help himself: He knows he should be courting the world's Linux devotees, but instead he pokes fun at them. He points out that Red Hat, the leading purveyor of Linux systems, announced revenue of $24 million for its last quarter of 2002. I don't know where this multibillion-dollar Linux business is."
however, earlier in the article, when discussing SUNs past we get to read this:
"Back in the mid-1980s, when Sun was still a startup, it had neither reputation nor intellectual property, and it faced a murderer's row of competitors. One quarter it even needed to borrow $50 million to make payroll."
yeah well, i suppose a lot of people were laughing at sun at that time too figuring out where 'the money' was. I can't believe how ignorent SUN is towards Linux.
Re:Sun Doesn't appeal to me (Score:3, Interesting)
This is where Sun is screwing itself over. Sun is a hardware company, and they make their money selling hardware, and support for that hardware. Their business model seems to be based on selling proprietary hardware which costs a lot, and is worth a lot. They need, among other things, scads of college students who are familiar with their OS and willing to recommend it over things like Linux and *BSD.
Sun is charging $20 for the x86 Cd for Solaris 9. This is the option for the poor college student, who definitely WON'T have a Sun workstation in his dorm room, unless it's an ancient sparcstation from the campus surplus (probably with Linux on it!). The problem is that for a poor college student, $20 for Solaris 9 is non-trivial. If you know you want to learn Solaris, you can easily do it. If you aren't sure, you surely aren't going to try it.
By trying to get a few bucks from selling CD's, they are completely ceding the ``recent college grads push our stuff'' effect to Linux and the *BSDs. Talk about being stupidly shortsighted! If a company puts in a Linux server, they can be reasonably sure that any computer-savvy recent graduate can assist a competent administrator. If they put in a Solaris server, not only do they pay more for the hardware, but they will have a much harder time finding cheap labor who are semi-capable of administering it.
Re:For payback (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think that's why he's saying. I'll use an example:
In my office there is an SGI system we bought ~6 year ago for doing visualization work. After about 1 year of using it, we needed more power. Did we go with a new SGI? No we went with a Linux box and an NVidia graphics card. The system was over 8 times as fast. It also cost 1/4 as much.
I think what the grandparent was says was that Sun should use Linux and make cheep, powerful x86 based workstations much like they are doing with servers.
Preoccupied With Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun vs Intel (Score:4, Interesting)
We recently performed an internal cost/benefit analysis of Sun vs. Linux on Intel. Our study showed that while Intel platforms are very competetive, they fall behind on supportability. Intel machines require VGA port, BIOS, and keyboard/mouse ports. To provide remote OOB management you end up spending a fortune in cards and/or console managers, that Sun has built-in to their low end equipmnt. By low end I'm talking about a 1U $995 machine.
In fact we recently had a conference call with Sun about their Linux boxes... I told them that if they wanted us to buy Sun Intel Linux machines they would need to dispense with the VGA port and provide the same Light Out Management console port that their Sparc machines have. Which effectively means they need to build an OpenFirmware/OpenBoot machine with a RJ45 console port. Sun's rep stated that they are working on incorporating those technologies into the Intel platform.
So I think if Sun can deliver such a machine, in the sub $1000 category they will end up as the trendsetter for Intel based Linux boxes.
Re:The article misses a few things as well. (Score:2, Interesting)
Sun squandered everything of importance to them in the last 5 years in a rush to overthrow the king of the hill (Microsoft) and so when a new challenger (Linux) arrived, they were too busy fighting the last war.
They acted like the dotcom era was eternal, and that people were going to buy their overpriced systems forever. When the easy money dried up, they didn't know what to do. You can't go from $5billion a quarter in sales to $3billion/qtr in sales and not expect your competition to eat you alive.
It wasn't the baby bell's fault that morons with bad business plans and a lot of cash decided to spend $millions on Suns while the money was flowing. Sun rode the dotcom wave and that wave hit the shore. Now the Linux tsunami is going to decimate Sun's beach and they have no time to move to higher ground.
The reason that $10k ultrasparcs are a dime a dozen isn't because of some grand conspiracy, it's the market sorting it out. The supply of these things is big (see dotcom wave crashing above) and the demand is weak - a $1000 linux box performs just as well and is more flexible, can run more apps, more O/S's and have a larger market to sell into. The market has to discount niche sun equipment to find willing buyers. That's econ 101 stuff.
Sun is not becoming a marginal player because the X protocol is denting CAD sales - They are becoming irrelevant because a $2500 wintel box will perform just as well, if not better, than their $10k offering. Sun abandoned the workstation market a long time ago anyhow.
Sun's chips are impressive but Intel's economy of scale kills them in price and comes close enough in performance that x86 is the smart decision for 99% of people today.
Sun shot themselves in the foot. It's their decision whether they limp along and heal or the foot becomes gangerous and eventually kills them. Frankly, I think they are toast.
--chuck
Sun's marketshare. (Score:3, Interesting)
The piece was a hatchetjob that displayed very little deep understanding of the IT market.
SoupIsGood Food
Never the high performance leader (Score:3, Interesting)
What Sun provided was a platform on which more software was available sooner than any other platform. Then, it became more software than any other platform except Microsoft. I am sure this is the origin of the pre-occupation with Microsoft. Yet, while Sun was regularly able to pummel its better performing competitors with its wider and earlier software availability, it just can not rival Microsoft in the breadth and timing of software available. Note that I am not refering just to the software produced by the system manufacturers. In fact, if that were the sole measure, then HP and IBM would have given Sun a much greater challenge. Sun's key to success was getting ISVs to use their platform as their native development platform, ensuring it was the first platform everyone released on. All the others were ports, and thus were released months later. This was a huge edge for Sun that was terribly difficult for competitors to remedy. Simply building faster, "better" hardware would not lure ISVs to shift their development platform to another hardware vendor's product.
But, Micrsoft is far ahead of Sun in exactly those things that allowed Sun to beat its competition. I don't see Sun ever being able to succeed using that strategy, and they sure don't seem to be interested in any other. Though, with the other RISC platforms dropping like flies, being replaced by Itanium with all of its performance and acceptance problems, and sudden Sun's hardware looks like it may become king of that hill. Of course, no one is paying for that class of hardware any longer... if they do, they now go buy IBM's tREX and run piles of virtual Linux machines on it.