Should Sun Just Fold Now? 683
KE1LR writes "The Silicon Insider at ABCnews.com is taking the position that Sun Microsystems, creator of the SPARC architecutre and, oh yeah, Java, should just give up and close shop instead of continuing to wither. I agree that Sun would have to have to do something dramatic to avoid what is looking more and more like an inevitability at this point, but what could stop this slide toward the same fate as DEC? Might they have anything in the works that could save them? What could it be?"
personnal opinion (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:personnal opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
- SDR RAM in an age when everyone's moved on to DDR
- 32 bit memory bus, when even the original Pentium in the 90's had a 64 bit bus
- crap outdated components and cards at ludicrious prices (E.g., is that an ancient ATI Rage that they're selling for almost $500? Well, gee, in the PC w
Re:personnal opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about speed. It's about reliability.
Re:personnal opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course not.
However, how many customers actually need this? Can a Linux cluster do as well? Because with the cluster, you can swap out entire computers without taking the cluster down.
So the question is not whether one Xeon PC can replace one Sun server, the question is whether cheap commodity hardware (probably clustered) can replace a Sun server. When you add up the hardware, the electricity, and especially the salaries of the IT guys to maintain it, is the cluster a better deal than the Sun server? (I don't know the answer for sure, but I'm guessing it probably is. Consider Google and their massive farm of cheap PC hardware.)
And even if the Sun server is still slightly cheaper this year, will it still be next year?
The 90's will never come again for Sun. Either they need to find a different way to make lots of money, or they are toast.
steveha
Re:personnal opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, this niche is disappearing as the PC's get better and more reliable, and the mainframes have gotten cheaper and started to move into the old UNIX-server market.
(Linux/390, anyone?)
Re:personnal opinion (Score:3, Informative)
Who fucking cares? For the cost of one of your "super-reliable" Suns, I can run a dozen PCs -- and if one, or even two fail, I can -- *gasp* -- simply replace them. Whole-unit replacement is a hell of a lot simpler and cheaper than fucking about inside a Sun.
Have you ever read through Sun's FE Handbook? It's a nightmare. Ever tried to hot-swap hardwar
Re:personnal opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
I find that hard to believe. I can buy a fully equipped SunFire V240 for $10k Australian (about $7k US). That's multiple disks, multiple CPUs, multiple power supplies, multiple gigabit ethernet, etc. Any single component can release blue smoke and the system won't care. I can hotswap just about everything. This isn't white box territory btw. These are 15000RPM Ultra160 drives, quad gigabit Ethernet, and an industrial strength case you could parachute drop onto site.
An equivalent x86 computer from a real vendor like IBM or HP runs around the same price (in fact sometimes IBM and HP are more expensive for the same performance). You could get slightly cheaper x86 systems (around $6k) by going to Dell but I wouldn't touch a Dell on a dare. You could go for whiteboxes - I could do an equivalent whitebox system for around $3k - but then you're definitely getting what you paid for.
I certainly don't buy your argument that you could get *12* whiteboxes for the price of one decent Sun box. The price ratio isn't that bad. My impression is that you have only ever bought personal computers for home use from a local whitebox supplier because Sun gear is certainly priced competitively for the corporate server market.
Re:personnal opinion (Score:4, Funny)
BZZZT, you fail server clustering 101 (Score:4, Insightful)
WHO CARES? My load balancer automatically detects a dead server and routes requests to another one. Then I go find the dude hardware, pull it out of the rack, and throw it into the garbage. For $4k I can replace it.
By the way, using a larger number of cheap boxes gives me on average better performance and better scalability. The age of Le Grand Box for most business uses is dead.
Re:personnal opinion (Score:3, Informative)
In one of the labs here they had a very large Sun system along with a cluster of suns happily working away. That was then. Now the sun systems are gone and in their place is a large Linux cluster of 20 PCs. One of them died recently. They shut the system down, turned off the power, pulled out the unit, took out the motherboard, put in the new motherboard, reconnected everything, and brought it all back up. Took a co
Re:personnal opinion (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, so let's compare. Let's compare a Sun Fire V440 [sun.com] and a HP DL580 G2 [hp.com]. Let's assume each is equipped with 4 top end CPU's, 8GB memory, dual Gigabit NIC's, 2x36GB disks, and a DVD-ROM drive on each -- sounds like a fairly standard server configuration to me.
Price
The V440 is more than 50% less!!!!!!!!! Ok, let's go to performance. Going to use the SPEC CPU2000 [spec.org] info for the DL580 G2 3.0GHz Xeons and going to use the Sun Fire V250 config mutltiple by 1.8 (since Sun has not yet releaed info on the 4-way V440 with the same 1.28GHz US IIIi CPU's tha the V250 has). (Listing below represents Cint2000/Cfp2000/Cint2000 rate/Cfp2000 rate).
Performance
Hmmmmm....two things jump out at me here -- the UltraSPARC IIIi is lousy at integer math, while the Xeon is lousy at floating point math. Either way, the 3.0GHz Xeon, which represents a clock speed difference of 234% greater than the US IIIi, only performs better than it by 28.7%. Increasing the CPU to 1.7GHz or going to US IV CPU's as Sun plans to do with the upcoming V490 will close the gap.
So overall, for 109.6% of the price of a V440, you're only getting 28.7% of the performance. Umm....what was your original point?
Hardware vs. Software (Score:5, Insightful)
Are there quality gaps in the Sun software stack? Yes. But there are two solid anchors in that stack: licensed JVMs on mobile identity tokens (cards, buttons, passports, phones) and licensed directory (LDAP) servers on the back end. Revenue generation from those two anchors will be sufficient for Sun to (gradually, painfully) upgrade the rest of their stack.
Not to mention OSS Java application evolution, which occurs despite Sun, but which value does eventually accrue to Sun. The academic penetration of Java has seeded a generation of bright ideas to be delivered via OSS Java. Those ideas may yet migrate to C#, but for now, the incumbency advantage goes to Java. If Sun R&D can escape NIH, the best of the OSS ecosystem would find a JCP path into their products.
Re:personnal opinion (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:personnal opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
Just MHO.
Headline: Apple wilts under Sun... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sun's biggest competitors are IBM and Hewlett Packard. Apple computers use IBM PowerPC chips. -- It's the same reason that Burger King restraunts started selling Coca-Cola products when Pepsi purchased Taco-Bell and KFC... Buying from your competition is bad business.
Apple is a desktop provider first. Apple sells servers as well, but only because of the demands for such hardware from companies that have standardized on Macintosh. Sun is a server company first, they have never had the capability of dealing with the commodity business of desktop hardware. The priorities of these two extremely different companies would never mesh. Thus the Culture would always run amok with the competing priorities.
Re:personnal opinion (Score:4, Informative)
Apple doesn't scale because you can't put a large number of chips in the same box. x86 isn't as limited, but it's not great either.
As you add processors, there is a diminishing return on inverstment with each one. iow, two uniprocessor boxes will be able to do more work than one dual box, however they cannot operate on the same data at the same time (I know beowulf, etc. give me a break). In some cases, one box with n chips will outperform a box with n+1 chips.
On Sun hardware, this difference is less than on apple and x86 hardware.
Sun's architecture is designed from the ground up to have a bunch of processors in the same box. This is part of the reason that their uni boxen are unimpressive performance wise. Scalability sometimes hurts small scale performance(Think using Oracle/MySQL/PGSQL for a table with 100 rows. Sorting and binary search would be faster).
Wow - that is just silly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Sun isn't prepared to play in Windows, they suffer.
That is like saying "because Ferrari isn't prepared to build economy cars, they suffer". You seem to be missing the point: Sun's real market is not the commodity-server area where Windows is popular. Sun shines* in the area of 8+ CPU machines that actually have to a) bear a heavy load and b) stay up while doing so.
* D'oh.
Re:Wow - that is just silly. (Score:3, Insightful)
They do. Ferrari is owned by Fiat for a reason.
> Sun's real market is not the commodity-server area where Windows is popular.
i.e. Sun's market is very small. Small markets are hardly ever sustainable long-term. Business consolidation happens for largely this reason. Your car analogy was very apt, but not for the reason you thought. Similarly, I saw a documentary about BMW on the history channel the other d
Re:Wow - that is just silly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Where Sun is getting killed is price point. I don't consider their hardware to be any more or less reliable than an x86 PC from Compaq, Dell, or HP. So let's say I have a massive computing need for, oh say, chip design. Chip designers, like Texas Instruments, Cirrus Logic, or General Semiconductor, require massive amounts of CPU time and even more memory. Sun's ultra-high-end offerings are worthless, since you simply can't cram enough RAM into their higher-end Enterprise servers. And guess what? It's a hell of a lot cheaper to setup fifty Linux PCs than twenty Sun Blades.
Oh, you want those servers to load balance/load share? To be in a cluster? More $$$'s. Want RAID? Want some kind of SAN solution? Even more big bucks for proprietary solutions from Sun, VERITAS, or Legato. But when they're Linux, clustering is free (software-wise.) And while the hardware costs for RAID and SAN remain high, the software to make them work is dirt cheap compared to anything you would have to buy for Solaris.
And now that major vendors are offering Linux versions of their design tools, we are no longer tied to Solaris. In fact, Sun's been slaughtered on the desktop; no longer do we stick Ultra 5's and 10's on the designer's desktops, now they're running their tools on Microsoft Windows 2000/XP. Admittedly this is way worse from a stability standpoint, but nonetheless, Sun has lost.
Sun has priced themselves right out of the market, and the few executives who are still there (after the previous mass exit) are too stupid to see the writing on the wall. It really sucks that I own Sun stock, with my shares being totally underwater and whatnot. Not to mention all the Sun hardware I have sitting on the floor next to me here, which isn't even worth the effort to eBay. :^)
Re:Wow - that is just silly. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow - that is just silly. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is nonsense. How about you show me a PC that takes from 96 to 192 Gigs of ram and can use most of that in a single process? You can't. Sun's midrage servers can do that sort of thing.
If you are doing BIG chips, you are almost certainly going to need either an IBM, HP, or Sun Unix box somewhere in the design flow. Linux just isn't there yet to handle the really big stuff.
Your idea about distributed processing is great... if the software supports it. There is still a lot of EDA software that is single threaded doing tasks that are either hard to split, or can't be split. And that is assuming that you can afford the extra seats of software to actually use it in a distributed computing scheme. Since there are tools that cost $750,000+ per seat there don't tend to be a lot those those dedicated to grid computing.
And now that major vendors are offering Linux versions of their design tools, we are no longer tied to Solaris.
I doubt that you would have ever really been tied to Solaris. You could always go to HP or IBM for most vendors. Now you can also do to Linux for the stuff that will fit. Not all of it will fit though if you are doing anything substantial.
Oh, you want those servers to load balance/load share? To be in a cluster? More $$$'s.
Free and open source [sunsource.net] from Sun.
Want RAID?
Disksuite [sun.com] is free from Sun.
Want some kind of SAN solution?
So, what software would you use on Linux that you wouldn't or couldn't use on a Sun?
I would guess from this that you aren't doing anything too tough since practically every serious EDA vendor (Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, etc) has pretty much bailed from Windows for their tools to do real chips as opposed to FPGAs.
Based on your comments it looks to me like you have been out of touch with what Sun has been doing for quite some time.
Re:Wow - that is just silly. (Score:3, Interesting)
And now that major vendors are offering Linux versions of their design tools, we are no longer tied to Solaris.
I can second this. I work as a chip designer, and we used to be locked to either Sun or HP boxes, because thats all that Cadence and Mentor used to support. Now that they have ported their apps to Linux we are not locked to hardware any more (thankfully). We used to have Ultra60s on everyone's desk, but those are dogs compared to current AMD and Intel machines (for chip design at least). The
Re:Wow - that is just silly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sun systems, in my experience, require *less* baby sitting. This is certainly the case when compared with Windows and sometimes with Linux. I can run larger workloads on smaller numbers of systems with Sun (and HP/SGI/IBM too) gear and spend my time doing proactive things that drive the organisation forward. In fact, that's what I did today and many many days before that. We have a staff of three admins looking after about 200 Sun's, 30 SGI's and about 100 Linux boxes (good quality HP equipment) an
Re:Wow - that is just silly. (Score:3, Insightful)
And the high end is a very small place, already overcrowded and getting smaller all the time.
Think on a flood: all animals go to high ground, and fight for a place. The sheep, the cows, the dogs, cats, goats, but also the wolves, the bears, the cougars.
That's what happening in the server high end right now, and I don't really think Sun is a cougar.
Re:Linux end of Solaris..... (Score:3, Insightful)
If I want to grow to a 12 or 16 way machine, from Sun, I have to BUY a 12 or 16 way chassis. Even with 2 or 4 CPUs.
Linux clusters are a great marketing word, but if you have a cluster that can do what my 12 and 16 way Oracle servers can do, let me know.
"Linux CLusters" that I've seen were all MATH clusters.
I expect that the SPARC will die and sun will be offering 4 and 8 way Athlon64 boxes REALLY soon.
Sun has (cray derived) backplane switches (not availa
Re:Losing on the cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, they do. Sun just certified one of their x86 servers with Windows [theregister.co.uk]
, and announced plans to certify ALL of their x86/Opteron hardware to work with Windows.
IMHO this could be the thing that saves Sun, because one reason many people stick with Sun is the quality of Sun support, which has always been some of the best technical support available. Now you can buy your Windows/Linux/UNIX hardware from one vendor, and know that you will get great support with a fast turn-around, and not end up on the phone talking to Apu in Bangalore.
Of course, given that some companies are opting to just make all of the x86 hardware disposable due to low per-unit costs, this might be a moot point. But then again, when a strange problem pops up in every machine in your 1,000 system cluster, you probably don't want to be dealing with a vendor who has cruddy support services.
That's obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Re:That's obvious (Score:5, Funny)
OpenWindows, OpenOffice, OpenFirmware... I think they've got Open down pretty well. Can't speak to "Free".
Re:That's obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's obvious (Score:3, Informative)
Looks pretty Open & Free stuff to me.
including a licence [sunsource.net] that's FSF [gnu.org]and OSI [opensource.org] approved
13 billion market cap (Score:4, Informative)
Re:13 billion market cap (Score:5, Insightful)
Because we all know that market cap is truly the way to judge the health of a technology company.
Sun Microsystems != typical "technology company" (Score:5, Insightful)
These guys are not selling dog food over the interweb-thingie. They have been around for ~22 years, and have a rather long history of building extremely robust hardware in the server space. (I specified server space because the Ultra5/Ultra10 and the low-end Blades are not great.)
No, I am not a Sun fanboy; I like most of their hardware, and I like Solaris. I just believe that people shouldn't treat Sun like the flash-in-the-pan goofy "technology companies" that made the bubble possible.
Re:Sun Microsystems != typical "technology company (Score:3, Insightful)
The article actually mentions a specific moment when the author understood that Sun has no future. It was when listening to a story about a tour of Google facilites -- the Google CEO pointed to the rows and rows and rows of cheap and semi-obsolete hardware which is Google server farm and said that Google will never buy expensive servers again.
The MRCH (Massively Redundant Cheap Hardware) approach is BOTH cheaper and more reli
Re:Sun Microsystems != typical "technology company (Score:5, Informative)
Google spent... oh, roughly $100m in software development getting to the point that they were saving enough money by using the distributed low cost low reliability PCs. That is a huge barrier to entry on such largescale clusters.
And Google is in a business where a little data loss in the searches is not going to seriously harm anyone. So they operate slightly lossy. They admit this pretty explicitly; one of their people, Anurag Acharya, was an invited speaker at the second Evaluating and Architecting System dependabilitY [uiuc.edu] symposium in 2002.
Neither the software investment to make reliable distributed apps nor the lossy data model are acceptable to typical business software. Do you want your bank losing 1-2% of your deposits, or having a consistency check error balancing your account at the end of the month? How about Amazon randomly deleting or inserting a few things from your orders...
And even where there is off the shelf distributed software like Oracle RAC, it's such a management and performance hit that people typically go back to buying larger single system image servers after testing it out... ask Oracle what percentage of their sales are RAC versus straight Oracle 9 some time.
There are applications... web farms spring to mind... where the Google model is a natural fit for the problem set. Strangely, that particular answer was well known five years ago, because people are not stupid.
Until every major business application is naturally and easily distributable larger servers will continue to sell. The software is just plain not there yet. Things are trending that direction; in ten years, the current model is in real serious trouble. Maybe sooner. But now? Don't believe dumb hype.
Companies can contract without folding (Score:5, Interesting)
TW
Generally (Score:2)
I have no opinion either way on Sun, yet.
Re:Companies can contract without folding (Score:5, Insightful)
You see it all over the place now. Someone must win, and the other guy loses. This is what so confounds all of the pundits when Apple comes out with things like the iPod and dominates that market. In their mind Apple was supposed to just give up since they couldn't "win" vs. PCs.
Its this kind of simplistic thinking that even made Microsofts monopoly come about. Its why we have two political parties who sometimes do not differ one iota with respect to certain policies (DMCA, government spending, easy treatment of big business,
Everyone's got to be right nowdays, and that requires that someone else must be wrong.
Any pundit who makes his living predicting X will die, Y will go under, Z is now irrelevant, doesn't deserve to be listened to, they haven't thought hard enough to deserve it.
Re:Companies can contract without folding (Score:4, Informative)
I'll wager this sort of eye-for-an-eye, zero sum logic is endemic to human thinking altogether.
Human history is chock-full of one culture declaring another ( largely similar ) culture to be at odds with their god/economics/what-have-you and proceeding to at least try to wipe the other out.
Think: crusades. Think: cold-war. Think: carthago delenda est.
The zero-sum is not exactly new. The difference is now we're dealing as much with corporate entities as with foreign cultures.
Re:Companies can contract without folding (Score:4, Interesting)
Just curious...was the outcome of the cold-war unsatisfactory in your opinion?
"The difference is now we're dealing as much with corporate entities as with foreign cultures."
Actually, that's not exactly new either.
Re:Companies can contract without folding (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Companies can contract without folding (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Companies can contract without folding (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Companies can contract without folding (Score:3, Interesting)
Woah.
<rant>
Sun sucks ass at Java. A VM that can only run one program at a time? Come on - we've been making real machines that run multiple programs at the same time for a long time. Not compiling to machine-native? The AWT? Swing, even? The miserable failure of applets and that technology. Damn, the list goes on and on.
Don't get me wrong, I'm coding in Java in my other windows right now, but I avoid Sun's terrible libraries whenever
Re:Companies can contract without folding (Score:3, Insightful)
Sun's primary architecture is SPARC, not MIPS, although Sun is now also shipping x86-64 (AMD Opteron) servers. Sun at one time used Motorola 680x0 processors.
In any case MIPS is relevant because, like ARM, it is the core of many "system on chip" processors used for things like TiVo series 2 boxes and tons of other consumer electronics devices.
If anything, Sun's recent rollout of cheap Linux/Java boxes followed by Sun's failure might be seen a
Re:Companies can contract without folding (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you rather have one fewer alternative to the Windows juggernaut?
The Cult of Mac keeps Apple alive and healthy and I think that's a very cool thing. It's not cheap to be an Apple cultist - I spend at least $3,000 a year on Apple hardware of various kinds - but what I get in return are genuinely great products that deliver excellent value for those who can look past a stiff initial price tag.
You could certainly argue that there is a similar cult built around Linux. There are eve
Oh come on (Score:5, Interesting)
First they built "low-end" workstations. They managed to make a killing at this. Eventually PCs started eating their lunch. So they "reinvented" themselves as a server provider. They did quite well at this until PCs started threatening that market. Then they "reinvented" themselves as a complete solutions company. They did quite well at this until PCs went 64bit.
Now they are "reinventing" themselves as a Desktop provider. They are honestly working to produce one of the most competitive desktops on the market. My current testing of their desktop shows that they still have a little ways to go, but for a first release they've done pretty well. When you combine in the publicity their Looking Glass technology is bringing them with the technologies that Sun is obtaining from Microsoft (I've been told that the next version of StarOffice will have Access support), they are truly posed to begin doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to them: Eat away from the bottom up.
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, they claim that they will be opening the source code when they finally release it.
(You can join and watch the official conference IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, in #xdevconf)
Also, there's an audio stream of the conference available; poke around on freedesktop.org as I don't have the URL handy.
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Informative)
Now, I'm going to watch the presentation on Croquet.
Desktop provider? What about SunPS and SunOne? (Score:3, Informative)
They own what's now JavaOne, which was SunOne, which was iPlanet, which was the Sun/Netscape Alliance products. iDS (iPlanet Directory Server) is a very good directory server. [okay, there's a few nice features in OpenLDAP that I wish they'd implement, such as being a
Re:Oh come on (Score:5, Insightful)
New game in town! (Score:5, Funny)
Come on, guys. Everyone's been talking about all these guy's deaths forever, but they're still here. There's a market for all of them.
~Will
new troll suggestion (Score:2)
Solaris is dead.
increase shareholder value? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also do you think anybody would invite them to work at their company after that?
This would be terrible if they did! (Score:5, Interesting)
Article a bit OTT (Score:5, Insightful)
"Sun is not coming back. It is a giant company without a business."
I think the article went a bit too far in predicting Sun's demise. Whilst it's true that the rating of their stock is poor and they have really failed in many areas where they would have liked to succeed, I'd say there are signs they may be coming back.
Now they have a collaboration of some description with Micro$oft; it's hard to get an ally with more punch than them, regardless of what you might think (or indeed Sun and Scott McNealy might think!) of them.
They finally seem to be realising that you can't have both the hardware and the software market. Look at IBM and Apple for precedents there. Sun has started a new price war [theregister.co.uk] on Linux and Windows on the x86 platform.
Re:Article a bit OTT (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Article a bit OTT (Score:5, Insightful)
Partering with MS is one of the worst decisions a company can make. They siphon off all of your best and brightest, and you get very little in return. Reference the Cringely article from a few weeks back for a list of companies that thought "parterning" with MS was a good idea and what happened to them. Do you really think that after all the bad blood in the last decade between these two that they will just suddenly play nice?
They finally seem to be realising that you can't have both the hardware and the software market. Look at IBM and Apple for precedents there.
What do you mean, look at Apple and IBM? They both do their own hardware and software. Apple is pretty much the only company shipping PowerPC anything, and IBM has a HUGE business in Power/AIX. That IBM ships x86 is only a response to customer demand, not some recognition that they shouldn't be in the hardware market. They still sell a ton of iSeries (AS400) and AIX on Power architecture.
Everybody is always right (Score:5, Insightful)
When conventional wisdom is 100% in the same direction, it usually ends up wrong. It's like just when everybody thinks the stock market is going up forever and all the amatures hop aboard,
Sun's stock (Score:5, Informative)
Sun's stock (SUNW) is now hovering at about 4.00 (down slightly today).
Here's SUNW over the past 5 years [cnn.com]
Re:Yes but how does Sun compare to other tech stoc (Score:3, Interesting)
They haven't had a profitable quarter since Q402, but they did breakeven in Q203 and Q303.
They have $3B in cash and marketable securities. They have $2.3B in accounts receivable. Not bad there either. They have $6.4B in total liabilities, but only $1.5B is long term debt. That leaves $6.4B in shareholder equity.
IBM will buy them (Score:5, Informative)
So, okay, fine, IBM can just wait a bit and buy Sun for a reasonable price. That way, Java won't have been released into the public domain and IBM won't have to argue (as much) when they want to change it.
IBM has the most to gain from control over Java -- arguably Microsoft has more but for legal reasons they won't bother even trying to buy Sun -- so they'll be willing to pay the most, so they'll get 'em.
A little ray of sun shine? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A little ray of sun shine? (Score:3, Interesting)
Cash is king (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, they could just take that cash, distribute it to their employees, lay them all off, then sell their receivables, contracts, and customer base to some other company *cough*IBM*cough*, then split that money amongst the 'execs'. There would be a lot of retired ex-Sun folks lounging around the pool.
Merge with Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
One would need to see a lot more client/server integration, but I think if Sun/Apple (one of my labmates suggested Snapple) marketed enterprise solutions consisting of high-end multiprocessor servers serving Java apps to Apple workstations, they might really get somewhere.
It's a gamble, but Apple could only profit from it and Sun needs new ideas fast.
Re:Merge with Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has no need of UltaSPARC, it's already made its deals with IBM for the PowerPC line, which is looking like a pretty good bet these days. Apple has as much Java as they need right now, I don't think Sun's Java expertise is going to bring much to the table. Solaris is of no use to Apple whatsoever really. Big servers - well that is something that Apple lacks, but they re beginning to make some slow but steady server progress on their own with the Xserve line - I don't think they are that desperate for a huge shot in the arm in the server market (let alone the conflicting chip architectures and OSs involved in expanding that way!).
No, it's Apple that has value to offer Sun, because right now Sun is making a bid for the desktop, and that is Apple's true strength right now.
That means there will be no merger. Sun might try buying Apple, but I think that would be rather too expensive for them right now.
Jedidiah.
Dumb Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple has moved into a post-Microsoft era with succesful consumer media products. There is absolutely no reason for these firms to merge.
This has been suggested before (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd rather see Sun completely re-assess their position and find out how they can leverage their core strengths (technology innovation, experience at the server side of computing, understanding of how to use the network as a computing machine, etc.) and implement a new strategy based on those stre
Re:Merge with Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Insert Sarcastic Comment Here (Score:4, Funny)
One out of two ain't bad.
What are they talking about? (Score:5, Interesting)
If my company needs anything beyond the $600 and $700 range, I would recomend Sun any day of the week.
Stupid Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Like is or not SUN, has to keep playing the game. It would loose even MORE money by trying to close up shop quickly.
A company has value for lots of reasons, besides pure, resellable assets: market position, reputation, etc.
What SUN needs is leadership like that which has helped Apple so much in recent years. If you look back far enough, you'll see a time when Apple was in quite a similar postion as SUN is today.
I'm not saying that SUN should start building sPods and sBooks. I think SUN needs to find its place in the market (hint: not the same place as Apple or Dell).
Why do we have this "grow or perish" mentality? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sun has a pretty cool niche - They produce some of the best server-class machines in the world. And I say this as a fairly vocal proponent of using commodity PC hardware whenever possible... I've had the opportunity to use a few decked-out UltraSparc boxen, and quite simply, they rock. A cluster of PCs can do the same task 90% of the time, but when you need high performance in a single box, you just can't do better (I also say that having used some of IBMs high-end offerings, and they just don't compare IMO).
So should Sun fold? No. They need to reprioritize, from growth to maintaining market share and quality. Not cutting costs, not appealing to more of shrinking market, but just doing what they do well.
As for the whole Java debacle... Well, if they can find a way to make money from it, okay. But if not, they need to stop flogging a dead horse, and just bury it.
Re:Why do we have this "grow or perish" mentality? (Score:5, Interesting)
The grow or perish mentality is related to the fact that capitalism requires an entity, be it a person or a corporation, to perform better than its peers/competitors. When an employee decides to work for a company, they will choose the best return on investment (i.e. most money/benefits/quality of life) that they can get for the investment of their labor. When an investor chooses to invest money, they are looking for the company that will give them the best return on their investment...in order to outpace their peers/competitors when it comes to acquiring wealth. This is what drives the fundamental economic engine.
An employee who also invests cash in their own company has even more at stake (which is typical of most large companies and their employees today). It behooves the leadership of said companies to provide the best return on investment for all parties concerned.
The unfortunate drawback is that productivity increases in personnel tends to have diminishing returns, so they tend to be expected to do more for less, while cash investors tend to scream the loudest for increasing returns, and they are paid more attention by the corporate leaders. In fact, many folks who both work for and invest in the same company tend to overlook this fact. They bitch about stock performance, then they bitch when they don't get a big raise or bonus, so they bitch even louder about stock performance, so the executives have to cut costs. I've seen it in action. The very same employee/owners who were griping the most about stock performance were amongst those who got laid off in order to cut costs.
Neat how that works, isn't it?
Re:Why do we have this "grow or perish" mentality? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think you missed what people are looking for.
Wall Street is looking for ROI. That's it. You're in niche market which is static? Good - maximize profits and spin off dividends, lots and lots of bug fat dividends. Or provide ROI by an increasing stock price.
Micro$oft, when growing, didn't pay dividends - but was well beloved because its stock price kept increasing. Now that its stock price is no longer ballistic i
Re:No it doesn't. (Score:3, Interesting)
Bollocks say I (Score:3, Interesting)
Companies do not commit suicide - and the article acknowledges that. Nor should they; an investment in a company is just that, an investment. The job of the directors (unless instructed otherwise by the shareholders) is to run the company in as profitable way as possible.
There is no way that Sun is worth more as cash than as a going concern. Just not going to happen. The very closest you could get to a corporate suicide of the type that this article advocates is a friendly buyout of some sort.
Personally my money's on Sun making a comeback; they invest in brains and research to an extent that to me inspires confidence in their future.
That sort of pollyanna-ism brings in the readers though, so I suppose it's a good tactic.
D.
Maybe if they included the gnu utilities (Score:3, Insightful)
The versions of these utilities that come with proprietary Unices are, frankly, CRAP.
openssh is another one; think back to last year... and the flurry of ssh patches. Linux easy! Solaris hard! Go figure.
Re:Maybe if they included the gnu utilities (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, the Solaris tar does suck, but on my JumpStart server, I ALWAYS include the GNU versions of tar, gzip etc.
If you want the latest-greatest, load the GNU utilities from the Solaris Suppl
Re:Maybe if they included the gnu utilities (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun's SSH on Solaris 9 is also a Sun-maintained version of OpenSSH. Last year, Solaris 9 was the current version, and patchi
it is true (Score:3, Interesting)
Long time in going (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun has a much more stable market of business buyers. They have to be selective to get back to profitability, but it's definitely possible, even without a radical change in market. People still pay big money for mid-range and high-end servers. People still pay big money for solid enterprise software. Business customers are willing to pay real money for real solutions. A company like sun just needs to make sure that it solves today's hard problems, and does it at a price that's similar to the competition.
A slump doesn't mean a fall. A re-org doesn't mean a death knell. Sun has lots of chances left to redefine itself, and figure out how to be profitable. They just might have to lose market share and girth in the process.
Car crash (Score:3, Insightful)
When I was learning to drive, a thing my driving instructor said to me has always stuck with me. He said the thing that causes most driving accidents is indecision.
I think companies like Sun (and Corel and others) start to fail when they become indecisive. They need to decide on their path and stick to it, rather than dressing up in a penguin suit one day and mocking linux the next.
Apple & Sun, IBM & Sun? (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple is definately making moves into the workstation/server space and OSX _can_ play there. Perhaps Apple could buy what's left of Sun in a year ot two (when there's much less than there is now) for firesale prices. This would mostly be to gain acess to Sun's sales channels and some engineering resources.
Or, more likely: IBM buys Sun and then takes Java in the direction it wants to take it. Of course, they also would probably want to wait for a lower price, so don't look for this to happen right away.
Sun's "Niagra" is very cool. (Score:4, Interesting)
If they can get this off the ground, it'll be great for servers.
Unfortunately, it's lousy for single-threaded compute-intensive processes like chip synthesis and simulation tools which are what I need.
It's interesting that they are kinda going back to the mainframe mentality where I/O and over-all throughput are more important than single-threaded performance, but with the way servers are going, this, I think, is really what is needed.
Google on Malone... The guy's a loose cannon. (Score:5, Interesting)
Malone, the editor of Forbes ASAP, reserves his most caustic remarks for Jobs, with whom he attended elementary school. He asserts that by the age of 19, Jobs had been ''involved in numerous felonies'' and was a drug user, bulimic, liar and cheat -- and went downhill from there. As the head of Apple, Malone says, Jobs was ''a lunatic megalomaniac,'' ''an executive horror and spoiled brat'' who was ''smelly,'' ''paranoid,'' ''vicious and belittling.''
http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/apr99/0054.html [xent.com]
Wow. The guy is a total tool. It's not like he wrote just one bad column in his life. Just going on what google kicks up, it seems like every week we puts his foot in his mouth. But I guess it's like Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern. People don't necessarily like or agree with them, but tune in to listen to them make a complete train wreck out of journalism. It must be the same thing with Malone.
I guess it's one way to make a living. It probably pays better than other media-stunt professions like hosting Fead Factor, denying the moon landing, or mongering JFK conspiracy theories (or more recently, 9-11 conspiracy theories).
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
After hearing the speaker waffle on about MadHatter, thin clients, new opportunities and that most-hated MBA word (and I'm an MBA) "monetizing" for about 10 minutes, I realized I already knew the answers to my questions.
At the short and informal reception following the speaker, an engineer who had sat on the panel (but didn't say anything during it) button-holed me to tell me that I had hit the nail right on the head - he said virtually all of Sun was trying to figure out the answers to my questions and as yet they did not have any answers.
Not much is sadder than the rusting hulk of a once great company in total denial.
some datapoints on Sun (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun is also competing with intel and it's hurting them just like it hurt Apple. Businesses realize that they can buy 5 PC's for the price of one Sun, so even the awesome support sun offers pales when compared to the bottom line (provided you're saavy enough to swap a DIMM).
There is one hardware product that they will continue selling, IMHO. Sunrays. [sun.com] These machines rock. I'm using one right now. The footprint and lack of fans are awesome... my office is so quiet I can hear the fans in the machines across the hall and I barely even notice the space it takes up (about 12" x 6"). But this is not going to be enough to keep their thousands of employees.
Black hole of customer support (Score:4, Informative)
Their customer support sucks. I say let Sun evaporite in a wave of Hawking radiation.
Re:Black hole of customer support (Score:3, Interesting)
If ABC can't get THIS right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's time for a certain broadcast news organization to 'just fold now.'
(and I suspect, soon, Motorola)? (Score:5, Interesting)
They are leaders in embedded tech. What does the idiot think? That because Motorola is going to go broke because Apple is shifting a small volume over to IBM (lets face it, its a small volume, they're great but 5 million CPUs/year is a drop in Motorolla's bucket.)
What a bunch of hogwash! (Score:5, Interesting)
However, they've still got the most lucrative part of their market, the ultra-high end. With their big models starting out at about a million bucks (and that's FAR from fully equipped), they've still got plenty to keep them going.
There are still lots of apps that don't cluster well, so a room full of PC's just doesn't cut it. and there are still companies willing to shell out for the hardware they need. Sun will have to scale back on the low end, there's no doubt, but that's not a problem for them. They've always preferred to make a large profit margin on smaller volume.
steve
its all about the IO (Score:3, Insightful)
Sun,Open Source Java or it may share Pascal's fate (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know if Java is a relevant source of income to Sun. I would think rather that it's a drain. It may be that the only value Sun gets from Java is brand name recognition. That in itself is worth a great deal, as it helps you sell other things that aren't a drain. However, that is only true if a competitor doesn't come along to duplicate and improve the Java technology with a catchy, if familiar, name to developers. Also, it wouldn't help if they do you one better and actually establish the clone as an official standard. If the clone should become a standard, it's entirely plausible that Open Source implementations would arise, giving developers Java without the name.
What would be even worse is that if those Open Source guys happen to decide to use the same bullet-proofing that allows the Linux juggernaut to currently cause havoc with Sun's UNIX businesses. You know that killer app that isn't an app, but a license called the GPL. We know the GPL eats competing proprietary licenses for appetizers, and the products attached to them as entrées. I think Sun's main competitor (now bosom-buddy) called it a virus, and are clearly afraid of it as they're the next course on the menu.
No, as long as those things don't happen, Sun should be able to continue on as it has for the past several years without worrying about their product being usurped from under them, and under a different name. No point heading off the disaster as long as such clearly ridiculous fantasies don't come to pass. Even if it would really cost them nothing (just save them a bunch on development and administration cost), and they would still be able to retain the brand name (the only value Java adds to Sun) while Open Sourcing Java.
If they GPL/LGPL'd it, their fears of permanent forking and the product being locked into proprietary platforms would all vanish. And, similar to Linus, they retain brand name, copyright,trademarks and control over the name. The JCP process would remain the defacto standard.
= 9J =
Why fold? Anyone can sell their stock. (Score:3, Interesting)
Calls for a company to fold are FUD, pure and simple, usually this FUD comes from someone who doesn't have a cent invested in the company and therefore no direct meaningful interest or someone shilling for the competition.
They said the same thing about Apple just before Steve Jobs brought them back from the dead.
If you want Sun to fold sell your stock and go away quietly, if you don't own stock then what is your real motivation in wanting them to fold? It certainly isn't the financial interest as an investor which is the only legitimate cause for the call.
Re:DEC, SUN, SCO, HP, IBM Unix Highlanders (Score:2)
Re:One Option... (Score:3, Interesting)