Sun to Cut 5000 Jobs

codemachine writes "In one of Jonathan Schwartz's first acts as CEO, Sun Microsystems has announced that they are cutting up to 5,000 jobs over the next 6 months. The company plans to sell property it owns in Newark, Calif., and to exit leases at a site in Sunnyvale, Calif. Analysts will be pleased that Sun has finally taken steps to cut costs, but what will this mean for the future of the company?"

Re:You know what this means...

[deanj]

To this day, I think the CEO of Commodore watched "The Producers" and thought he could do the same thing with a computer.

The "success" the Amiga had was because of the folks in Engineering, and it's user base.

Not true

[bADlOGIN]

Nobody cares about what happens to the workers who get fired.

Anybody who still or might some day work for said company cares. People still working want to know what happens since companies are creatures of habit when it comes to lay-off policy. If it's 3 hours notice and zero severence, people will step up the job hunt and take just about any offer to get the hell out. If it's a nice pacakge, they'll take stock in thier own finances and weigh the bail-out-now option against it. Anyone who might want to work for the company will shy away for 18 months or so (long enough to forget and/or tell themselves "yeah, there were layoffs, but that was almost two years ago and...").

Cutting staff is never a good sign and reflects a colossal amount of stupidity on the part of management. In this case, it means "we couldn't figure out how to make money with these 5,000 people". Unless it's 5K worth of mouth-breathing middle-management, it's a sad statement on the company vision & direction from the top and the lack of grasroots channels to communicate from below. Nothing worthwhile coming from the top, nothing able to break through from the bottom....

The real question is, how much of a pay cut are the top execs taking? What's that you say, zero? In fact you say they're getting fat bonuses? Yeah... that's what I thought....

More informative link

[gh]

Jonathan Schwartz's blog says a lot more behind the decision to cut the 5,000 employees. You may or may not agree with the decision, but it's far more informative about the direction Sun is heading in than the /. submission link.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=ph ase_2 [sun.com]

Re:Sun - Corporate mismanagement at its finest

[y2dt]

actually Sun did have its own Linux distribution. It's was called Java Desktop and I think it was based on Suse.

And yes they used their "vaunted engineering skills" to help Linux. Sun is a very big supporter of Gnome Desktop