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The Faded Sun
jlowery writes "Robert X. Cringely seems to
think so. Forget the hardware side: what does this mean to the future of Java? Will there be enough incentive to continue to develop the language for whoever acquires Sun? Or will Java developers have to swallow hard and submit to the whims of the dark overlord? Maybe I'll switch to Mac development, after all."
While I agree that MS may do some things to keep their market share up which could be considered monopolistic, they have MANY valid reasons to exclude Java from Windows. They shouldn't be forced to include ANY 3rd party app in Windows. They make it easy to install Sun's Java if a user wants. That's good enough. I personally hate Sun's Java. It's a hog or resources on your system and the applications written for it are slow too. Sun is more than welcome to include their "crap" in their Unix/Linux OSs. Do you think that if MS developed .NET framework for UNIX--Sun should then be forced to include it in their distribution? No. Go cry on someone else's shoulder Sun.
.NET and it blows Java out of the water. If the Mono project takes off, it'll rule!
By the way... I was a 5 year Java developer. I tried
You are right about your comments about Solaris, but are mistaken about Sun's stance regarding your other comments. Regarding the executives thinking that the future is in selling hardware alone, you're incorrect - Sun is trying to sell itself as a solutions vendor - not just hardware, but software and services as well. See http://www.sun.com/solutions/ for more info. Regarding your comment saying that Sun is ignoring high-volume low-end side of the market, again this is not correct - sun has introduced the LX50, and 1U rack mount system that runs linux or solaris (x86). See more about that at http://wwws.sun.com/servers/entry/lx50/
Finally, a word about Robert Cringley - how many times does this guy need to be wrong before the industry starts ignoring him?
>> Anyone care to confirm the facts mentioned?
... I'm sorry to say this, but Robert X. Cringely seems to lack the foundation of technical journalist. Who knows he's the one who'll be gone in five (or less than five years)?
This is a troll like you said; there are too many things that I can disclaim, but I just list a couple as follows.
> Sun has no real technical leadership. (from the article)
Just to name a few... Billy Joy? James Gosling? John Gage? Aren't they three of greatest leaders in IT (and science in general) in our generation?
> Sun did not invent the engineering workstation, but they certainly perfected it. (from the article)
Sometimes, only perfection (or 90% complete) can claim invention. For example, Apple did not create GUI (Xerox should claim that right), but they perfected it; they have a right to say that Apple invented GUI. In that sense, Sun invented workstation.
> At that rate, the company has at most five years to live. (from the article)
No one can tell what's going to happen in this arena. You've got "only" five years, so you are dead. That sounds too premature. Anything can happen in five years in IT industry. As the author claims, Sun might be gone; on the other hand, Sun might be ruling the world by then.
I can point out many more, but one of things that the author Robert X. Cringely seems to misunderstand is that Microsoft, IBM, and Sun are doing the same thing and competing in exactly the same market, which is not true. Also it is important to note that Sun is a technology company. Companies like Microsoft are becoming a technology company (and some never will be). Looking at PC sales and saying "Oh, Sun is doing horrible in this environment, they are going Sayonara" is premature and
Let me explain..
First, I didn't say Solaris is "free for all". I said Solaris is free or cheap. I really meant to say "Solaris is free or relatively cheap"
Second, $999 is relatively not that much for a box that cost upwards of $20,000 when it was new. I bet $999 is even less than the cost of a yearly hardware support contract for such class of machine. A Win2k or other commercial Unix license for this class of server would cost a lot more.
(e.g a 25-user Win2k server license is being quoted for around $3000 by Dell while the quad-processes Sun server could easily provide file/print/directory services to hundreds of machines for a flat license fee of $999)
Finally, Solaris -is- free even for businesses for unlimited number of systems as long as they have one CPU and as long as were originally purchased for Sun or Sun's authorized reseller. Everyone else has to purchase a license. However, as I have already pointed out, Solaris licensing is relatively cheap.
To get a 100 disk fiber Disk array, connected to a 8 way box. One that doesn't throw a drive or a controller or a cpu every other week. Sun Solaris sucks ass, Debian GNU/Linux is the One True OS, but the hardware works. We have tons of linux boxes, but they all suffer from running on x86 hardware. Whether we buy it part by part and build it ourselves, buy it from Dell or HP/compaq they just fall apart.
We've got several Dells with RAID drives, 4 CPUs, never a linux crash (ala BSOD), but we get on average 1 major hardware crash every year on EACH machine due to hardware going south.
We also have similarly equipt sun servers (that suffer from an even higher load). We're talking about 17 SUN 4500's, the ONLY failure over the last four years was due to a fiber controller failing, it was a dual controller, but a firmware mismatch caused the 2nd controller to not come on line properly. 1 outage and it was our fault anyway, if we had upgraded the firmware like we're supposed to it would have never happened.
Sun might need to get out of the cheapo 1U, $2000 "server" market and clean house Concentrate on selling expensive, quality hardware to people who can afford them. If whatever your sever is doing generates real money buy sun you won't regret it.
Yesterday's news about Dell seems relevant to your point.
An excerpt from the above link:
In particular, Dell appears to be part of the explanation for the recent poor performance by Sun, the leading provider of network servers. For years, the company's systems -- running a proprietary version of Unix -- have been the market leader, but lately servers from Dell and others running Windows or open-source Linux have been eating into Sun's market. Dell said its server shipments rose by 28 per cent, more than five times the growth experienced by the server market overall.
Although it's true that Dell had an exceptional quarter and most of its growth came from non-server related services, the continuoous erosion of the Sun's hold on the server market is indicated by Dell's (and others') stronger performance in the same sector. But, hey, if Cringley is right, Sun still has five more years to recapture their market share and introduce technological innovations other than Java.
The web is a dominatrix. Everywhere I turn, I see little buttons ordering me to Submit.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
This is correct. Fortunately, that isn't what's happening. What's happening is that MS is being forced to honor terms of a *contract* that no one forced them to enter into.
.
They signed a contract, they tried to weasel the terms and got bitch slapped, so they tried to "nullify" the contract. .
and got bitch slapped.
If they didn't *want* Java as a default part of the Windows world all they had to do was refrain from signing the contract, that *they* took the initiative in pursuing, guarunteeing it would be.
It's a pretty simple issue really.
KFG
What a load of nonescense! On paper yes Sun did come out $2 billion down last year. Want to know why? Four(?) companies it had previously bought which it had to write down its valuations of. Take a look at its accounts, it took a charge of $2.125 billion for "Impairment of goodwill and other intangable assets". Read this to mean "some accountancy stuff that doesn't mean diddly to the companies operations". Thats it, period. It was a brave, forthright financial disclosure it could have put off for a couple of years, or dripped out, but it wanted to do a clear-out, get all the bad news out in a one-er and be able to post figures uncontaminated by that stuff from now on. The actual operations made money, I think it was around $10 million. Granted for a company of its size this isn't much, but this is the figure to look at. They increased cash reserves, its only the companies paper valuation that dropped $2 billion, they didn't actually loose any money. According to the basis of Cringely prediction, Sun continuing on exactly the same path, the market doesn't get any better, etc, etc, in 5 years time it will only have $50 million more in the bank than today. Does someone want to explain to me how this means its going to fold? IANAFA (I am not a financial analyst) but that sounds like bullshit.
Sun has a huge cash reserve, $1.5 billion, another $1 billion in stocks and short term securities, and other bits and pieces. Add all the assets together, excluding plant, 'intangables' and the like and its got $8.3 billion it could pull together if necessary. Oh, and it has no debt at all, period.
Cringley strikes me as a very poor journalist, he didn't even take the time to look into the basic details of the recent accounts, or if he did he was incapable of understanding them. Why does anyone bother reading this cretins opinions, he does seem to have a track record of being unnecessarily sensationalist and outstandingly wrong.
Disclaimer - I work for Sun as an engineer. Whilst I can't say too much on this topic I would say this year is looking pretty good thank you very much. The views expressed here are my personal opinions.
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
As a current employee of Sun Microsystems, I can at least clear up one little factoid in the article that every Sun pundit likes to mention for dramatic impact without either understanding or wanting the reader to understand.
The so-called $ 2 billion loss was a one-time writeoff that had to do with the revaluation of various companies that Sun acquired. People who bother to research their facts rather than simply spit them back verbatim for shock value would see that this is something that many companies do, and is more a sign of the bad economy than necessarily bad management at Sun. Without that write-off, Sun would have made a small profit.
I can't really comment on the other points in the article, since a lot of it is subjective, and anything I might say on it would be inherently biased by the fact that I work for Sun.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
let's start with the facts.
He says the battle will be lost to cheap stations that use AMD and Intel hardware.
No sane company at this point is going to put mission critical applications on Intel hardware unless it scales horizontally amazingly well. weblayers - yes. application servers - yes. big databases that are read-write? NO.
And who is going to provide the 1-hour onsite response time that comes with Sun's Platinum service for those flocking to cheap hardware?
Sun's legacy servers (4500, 6500, e10k) were pretty amazing, but had some faults (Ecache failures, lack of true power redundancy, etc). But Sun's new line of servers is truly amazing. The 4800, 6800, and e15k all support true partitioning, including FULL separation of power circuitry between partitions! as with the last line, they are very interchangeable with each other. now add solaris, an OS that is stable, and scales extremely well up to 106 processors and 512 GB of RAM in one machine (read again, that is 512 GIGS of RAM). did I mention hot-swappable CPUs? did I mention that Sun's partnership with Hitachi lead to Sun's offering of 75 Terabyte SAN-attached arrays?
So, Mr. Cringely, who exactly is going to fill this gap for Enterprise servers for mission critical apps if Sun tanks?
But yet he claims that Sun has "no real technical leadership". how about that. so they dont. most companies with "real technical leadership" sit on the sidelines and daydream about marketing products with this kind of quality.
I guess if Sun tanked, people could still buy IBM or HP hardware and run (gasp) AIX or HPUX. I've been responsible for AIX in my life, and it's not really pretty. And IBM's linux offering on mainframes seems as absurd to me as spending the money for a twin-turbo porsche and then asking for vinyl seats because you don't like the feel of real leather.
In a sense, I'm biased because I have built my career around being an expert in Sun hardware, Solaris, Veritas tools, and Perl. But then, this is exactly why I am able to know how big corporations think. CTO's aren't wandering from big UNIX machines for awhile when it comes to anything important...
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Well, you're making the common mistake of lumping all of "sun hardware" together, like it's the same. It's not. Sun has some real junk, designs that never would have gotten out the door at a low cost pc clone maker. (E.g., the Sun Ultra 10, where the drives weren't even on rails and one drive needed to be removed in order to get the other drive out.) Their high end stuff is generally better, but you can't compare that to some "uber-clocked Athlon-space-heater"; if you compare high end sun on one hand you have to compare high end pc on the other--and those are also pretty well designed. A high-end pc server has a lot of hot swap components, internal redundancy, etc. It doesn't have hot-swap processor boards and it doesn't scale past 16p or so, but that's a slim market for sun to live off--and sun isn't the only player there. You can get better scaling from SGI or HP, and you can get better reliability from IBM.
Then there's support. You've made the other mistake of thinking that every one of the thousands of sun techs is equally good. Sometimes you get a good one. Sometimes you don't. I've got some real horror stories about the bad ones--examples where some jerk sent for a million dollar support contract replaces the wrong part on a multimillion dollar system. The point is that the support is only as good as the guy who shows up on your doorstep, and you don't get a lot of control over that. You've got the same problem for pc support, but the machines are so much cheaper that n+1 redundancy is more realistic. I'd much rather have a spare machine than trust that the support monkey will show up in a timely fashion and will manage to fix the problem. (Remember that your contract probably says something like "four hour response" rather than "four hour time to resolve"--that just means they answer the phone within four hours. If you have a time-to-resolve contract you almost certainly have spares on hand, and sun has no advantage there.) I'd really much rather have in-house staff replace the parts, because at least they're responsible to my management chain. With pc makers that isn't usually a problem. Sun really doesn't like unauthorized people working on their expensive hardware. You can get in house staff authorized, but that also costs quite a lot of money (and when they leave you just lost that investment.)
Didn't you notice this ?
;)
...) provide a multi-platform, multi-architecture, multi-purposes standardized API that got years of feedback.
... or whatever opensource J2EE solutions...
MS is pushing peudo "Sun decline" in order to try to damage the Java momentum in the enterprise market.
They try to make people forget the fact the dotNet is not realy in a win-win situation and that pushing the dotNet strategy was more than risky for they OS leadership.
The only real fact was that Sun was cutting Job because they have to integrate the new market needs, but this has no provent or supposed impact (short term or long term) on Java platform developpement. Just because most of the developpement of the Java platform are now in hand of the JCP (Java community Process) !
Counting the members of the JCP thru the various specs you will notice that Sun is no more the real leader of the Java platform. Java success has exceed Sun's success story expectation. This led to a trouble: Sun has few and few control over Java and get les and less bucks from it
Now, event if Sun memebers lead most importants JSR (cf. Spec Request to the JCP), they are no more positioned to restrict any further move to the next Java evolution.
By killing their old tech (MFC, COM, MTS, VB, VC++) and pushing a whole new object oriented java clone paradigm. MS has take major risk for they next 5 years developpement platforms.
Now, enterprise having long term project on MS tech are just stoping their project and looking to gain ROI by choosing a referenc implementation platform. Two competitors are now named : dotNet or Java.
Here, Java score the goal because every firm has alredy lead a success Java story whereas having dotNet game is not realy so successfull at this time as it is still years feature-late.
Let's face to a fact : dotNet is still in infancy and only provide very very core standard specification whereas Java (J2EE, J2SE, J2ME, JavaCard,
Do you think you could spend $M in a tech that has not yet mature ?
The only solution for MS is to realy comply the Java specs with their specs and they realy compete with big players as IBM, Oracle, BEA
Time will show the winner !
Have you ever worked in a mission-critical data center enviornment? I am big fan of Apple, as I have had a mac for over ten years now, but pretty friggin GUI is the last thing you look for in a sever enviornment.
If you are spending significant amounts of time logged into the console of your servers chances are you have done something wrong to begin with, but whether or not the box will run on its own until the end of time while I lay dead at the keyboard is far more important the lifeless, sterile experience it provides the end user. Sun has not designed Solaris to be pretty. They have designed it to work. To do its job. And that it does.
Hello? The entertainment division of sony is the only part that's profitable.
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
A bunch of us OpenBSD enthusiasts at lunch the other day were listening to the guy who got most of us interested in it, explain the value of OpenBSD's recent efforts to close off executability of whole areas of memory, including the stack.
He mentioned that SUN hardware allows individual memory pages to be marked "non-executable" by the hardware, wheras Intel hardware can only select on "line in the sand" of all memory space below which the processor won't execute.
I believe he also mentioned that this is just ONE of many ways in which SUN hardware is more appropriate for really secure and reliable computing - the kind you want on those $1M servers that big corporations buy.
Anybody care to list off other reasons why SUN's hardware is more trusted for the enterprise servers? Price/Performance is nice, but it isn't everything...
You are right: earnings don't matter. What was Sun's Cashflow last year? Positive? Negative? What was that value?
...it is burning cash.
Here is the cash flow statement for Sun: http://biz.yahoo.com/fin/l/s/sunw_qc.html
It shows Sun is cashflow Negative (-$73million)
The balance sheet http://biz.yahoo.com/fin/l/s/sunw_qb.html shows sun has cash and receievables of $5.6 billion and Current Liabilities of $4.3 billion. So, it has a diff of $1.3 Billion. That $1.3 billion is Sun's margin of error for a turnaround (without massive layoffs and the like).
I'm not quite ready to say that PHP will rule over Java, but it's not what you make it out to be. Common myths that you brought up:
1) PHP dev ties you to HTTP. While PHP was originally developed for WWW, and is still commonly installed as a web server module, it also has fully functional CGI and Command-Line modes, either of which execute nicely at the command line.
2) You can't use PHP to run/compile a console/client application Again, this is not true. You can compile PHP code (with the Zend encoder) and you can write decent, client-side applications with PHP-GTK.
Again, I'm not saying that PHP==Java, but I do want to see a powerful tool get the respect it properly deserves!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
So an indian H1B vinod khosla helped create 40000 jobs, where is your logic?
Do you actually own a Sun? You should probably open it up and compare it to your uber-clocked Althon-space-heater sometime. Their hardware is very high quality. Their support is as well.
Since I own both I feel I can field this one. Take the case off your workstation someday, you may be in for some surprises. First off, my Sunblade 100 has ecc pc133 sdram(4x512M) - my Athlon has ecc pc2100 ddr (4x512). The Sunblade shipped without a SCSI controller or drives - I don't know if the stock IDE was ATA/33, 66, 100, or 133 - but I'm willing to bet it was probably ATA/66. No matter -- added an Adaptec SCSI controller and ultra 160 drives. My Athlon shipped with on-board u/320 SCSI controllers with the same U160 drives. The Sun box has firewire, the Athlon Gigabit Ethernet - don't use or care about either. Don't know about your Sun box, but mine sure looked like a cheap-ass Dell on the inside. I suspect Sun is doing the same cost cutting on the 'premium' parts..... Both have been rock solid, and all the vendors give top notch support at this level.
Here is where it counts - one I use for active code development, the other just sits there as a DB, LDAP, and whatever else I can sluff off to it. My dual 1.73ghz Athlon/Linux workstation spanks the 500mhz Sunblade/Solaris box. Similar specs (sans CPU), but god almighty, it is not even close at firing up Mozilla, building an EJB, using OpenOffice, or getting anything done.
The rules are a bit different for what makes a solid server (I/O rather than CPU speed) - but stick a fork in it, it is done in the workstation market. Something where you need the 64-bit environment might give you an edge, but with the new 64-bit AMD and Intel chips working their way to market, even the new 1.05G UltraSparc III's seems a bit hollow.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
_ALL_ Sun servers are very stable, but slow. SPARC speed is poor, take a look at SPEC CPU2000 Results. The memory bandwidthis _very_ low. In Linpack-top500 you won't see SUN in the 100 first places.
The Fujitsu SPARC64 V is better chip and 100% compatible with SUN solaris/SPARC. And better servers with 128 CPUs !!!!
LiNUX is a better alternative below 8 CPUs: Migrating Oracle9i - Based Sun Servers to Dell Servers Running Linux and Migrating Oracle9i - Based Sun Servers to Dell Servers Running Linux, Part 2. LiNUX+x86/ia64 , and soon AMD x86-64, is cheaper and faster than Solaris/SPARC
DEC/Compaq/HP have the best chip (Alpha EV7) and the best UNIX servers (ES47,ES80,GS1280) in RISC arch. It's a pity that Alpha is going to die to put intel ia64 instead.
And if you need NUMA machine, SGI Altix is for you.
Why do you need to buy a SUN server?