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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
I know Sun is losing money, but this article sounds subjective and trollish all the same. Anyone care to confirm the facts mentioned?
The Java specs are done by the Java comminity process, if Sun goes down (I really hope not and I will be one of the first to jump on their desktop machines) someobody else (possibly IBM) will take over Suns role in the JCP. There is too much investement especially on IBMs side to let it go.
Any company that chooses .net over other alternatives will get what they deserve. That will be a high cost in the future in the form of never ending payments to Microsoft.
.net without any knowledge of Microsoft's future pricing policies, commitment requirements and security policies.
Microsoft has demonstrated time and again that the customer comes second to Microsoft revenue.
A company IT manager should be fired for even recommending a commital to
These same companies will also be helping MS in their attempt to completly control internet standards. Control of standards by Microsoft will stifle competition and further ensure the company's future cost will be high.
Sun's just been overtaken by events. If anything, they ought to be an attractive buyout target for somebody (IBM, Apple). Solaris is still a good OS, Java's still a good technology.
I will say this, I think they're in better shape than SGI -- but that's not saying much.
I remember awhile back when those $1000 Sun workstations were released. One of the most cogent responses I saw was something to the extent of, four years ago, I'd have one on order already, now I just don't care.
You can have an amazing *nix workstation on PC hardware. If you want polish and flash, buy a Mac (he says as he types this on the iBook he just bought....)
They have just renewed a commitment to the Solaris operating system, which is no longer really viable from an economic standpoint. I know, I know, Solaris users love Solaris, but they don't love Solaris prices.
This statement is wrong. The cost of Solaris is not an issue. Solaris licenses are either free or cheap depending on what kind of hardware you own and where you got it. The real problem is in the cost of Sun's hardware as well as relative performance of UltraSPARC processors compared to the 32-bit x86 processors and certain 64-bit processors. Sun executives are still living in an imaginary world thinking that Sun's future is in selling large mega-bucks systems to the data centers completely ignoring the low-profit high-volume low-end side of the market.
I don't think it is that abstract though. .NET framework might not be that bad, or even very good.
Purely technical, the
The problem is not with the technical side of Microsoft, but the contracts and legal-issues associated with licensing their software.
Microsoft has a tendency to create contracts and agreements which bind you not only by hands and feet, but which will also "dictate" a predefined Microsoft-approved-certified-blahblah direction.
Ok, his first points are very valid and I will agree. Sun is in serious trouble. They're betting the company on N1. Apple won't buy them. Java wasn't the smoking gun.
/. folk, agree - they're not doing the right thing.
But to say that a merger with Sony would be better than Apple is just plain dumb. What have the two in common? Absolutely nothing. Sony has no interest in the server market - if they had they'd be there already. Furthermore, the technology that Sun pioneers has absolutely NOTHING to do with ANY Sony market.
He article further states that N1 puts Sun in direct competition with Microsoft and IBM. Uhh, hello, where you have been dude - they've been in competition for a long time now. If he is trying to draw comparison between N1 and a MS or IBM product then he should do so. From what I've read N1 has a LOT of potential. And while IBM is certainly a contender in the distributed-computing area, MS is definitely not.
Although Cringley was clearly drunk when he wrote this, he makes good points. And I would agree that N1 is certain to fail. Not because it won't perform, or not because Sun is actually using sales people to sell it, but because the market is rather slim. N1 doesn't benefit a small or medium sized company very much. Not nearly as much as it does the enterprise.
I don't know what Sun should be doing right now. But I, and I bet a lot of you
Perhaps the problem is that the distinctions in the computer market have altered and Sun has no place for its hardware? It used to be that there were servers/mainframes, workstations and then puny PCs. PCs have grown in capability, however, essentially absorbing the workstation definition and market, leaving Sun with little room in that segment. IBM chose to make servers the core of its business, while Microsoft and Intel dominate the PC market.
.NET and the hype machine is in full force - and still Sun has failed, to my knowledge, to respond.
For quite a while I've been wondering exactly what Sun is up to. They calmly sat back while people kept repeating the mantra that Java is slow (even though it isn't; JIT-ted code and better GUI techniques improve performance markedly), allowing it to lose mindshare to competing products. Now Microsoft has shipped
Even if Cringley's article is wildly inaccurate, it does reflect the concerns and questions of a number of people, particularly those who do not use Java as part of their job. What the hell is Sun doing?
It is a shame what's happening to Sun, because it's indicative of what is happening to computing in general. Sun's old machines were solid, powerful machines that just worked. I used a sparcstation 5 up until a year ago at work, and while it was dog slow, it still worked all the time, because it was built at a time and for a market that expected that computers *worked*.
Now, thanks to the whole IBM PC/Windows thing, when a computer crashes, people say "oh, that's ok, that's what computers do" and hit reset. I'm not saying I'd rather have a blade100 on my desk than a wintel box, but I wish that my winel box had some of the engineering quality from Sun.
With so much of Oracle's software related to Java and their excellent JDeveloper Java development suite, it would be wise for Oracle to acquire Sun if they can.
Imagine, Linux/Java/Oracle Vs Windows/.NET/SQL Server and either combination could run on similar hardware....
Did you miss out this post and all the replies?
IBM has a lot invested in Java. It's become their common development platform for their various OS's they run from Linux on up. Native code for the heavy-duty stuff, Java for everything else. Probably saves them billions a year.
I think if Sun burns up (and with numbers like $2 billion in losses, it could happen overnight, look at Enron/WorldCom... who knows what sort of tricks are being played with the books) IBM would be the first in line to grab Java.
Just my best guess.
-Russ
Me
>> 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
I must agree that Sun is really in trouble. Solaris is not the blame but the hardware price and performance is.
I work in a semiconductors startup. Two years ago when the company was founded Sun hardware was the default when it came to choosing CAD servers. Sun even had a nice discount program for startups.
These days we can get a fast Pentium4 or Athlon (running Linux) to do the same work for a lot less $$$. Maintenance is also much cheaper.
All the big CAD software vendors now support i386 Linux and the platform is stable and FAST!
In fact, the only reason Sun hardware is still worth keeping around is because it supports large (>4GB) memory. When somebody finds a way around that (AMD Hammer comes to mind) Sun will loose its last asset.
It's a pitty, cause Sun is a good enigneering company. They invest heavily in research and are a major source of innovation.
They just can't keep up with the falling prices of that huge i386 market. No one can (not even Intel's own Itanic!)
Utter horseshit. Everyone lost sales last year: IBM, HP/DECompaq, SGI, Fujitsu-Siemens, Bull, NEC... everyone. Sun lost fewer sales than the other major players, so they picked up marketshare. They hemmorhaged money because of spotty buisiness practices from the dot-com era comming up to catch them, but as Cringley says, they've got another five years to get that sorted out.
Sun's transformation from a king of the workstation vendor into a server powerhouse that only IBM has any real hope of competing with is nothing short of phenomenal. If it looks like Linux is going to kill the proprietary Unix market, then Sun will go Linux... they've made similar moves in the past. Sun switched their entire installed base from the BSD-derived SunOS to the SVR4 flavored Solaris, no small feat at the time. A switch to Linux will be a snap, and yes, Sun will still charge you as much for your Sun-branded Linux as they do for Solaris, and get it from satisfied CIOs, along with fat service contracts.
Sun is never the first to market. Sun is never the ideal solution. Sun never offers the highest performance. Sun is never the cheapest option. Sun doesn't offer the best service in the industry. But they come "close enough" on so many fronts, they're an unbeatable market force. Add in Java, which rules enterprise computing like no technology since COBOL, and Sun ain't going nowhere.
Apple bled billions in the '90s, but they rebounded. McNealy's at least as smart as Jobs, and his marketing instincts are almost as honed. Sun has replaced IBM, and even Windows, in the hearts and minds of every serious CIO and VAR. Give it a year for either the economy to have rebounded, or for Sun to have staunched the bleeding on its own with austerity measures and something innovative. This is the company who managed to launch a line of workstations at the height of the NT onslaught in the Workstation market, and managed to make a mint with them. (The Ultra5 and Ultra10.) They aren't out of tricks yet.
Tho it would be nice if they put the screws to Fujitsu-Siemens to get access to their SPARC design... call it "SuperhyperultraSPARC" or "BadAssSPARC" or "TotallyAwesomeSPARC" or somesuch, and use it to hold the Itanium/POWER dogs at bay while they ready the UltraV.
SoupIsGood Food
I gotta agree, I was largely agreeing until this Sony crap came along. I'm not sure what they could do to stave off their long-term demise.
A couple of people have made the point that Sony and Sun have virtually nothing in common. I beg to differ. They have alot in common, i.e. a strong desire to get rich. But, for a non-flipant answer, heres a serious one.
Japan does not have the same anti-trustor trade laws we have in the US, therefore massive organizations of businesses, called kiretsu(sic?) exist. For an American equivalent, think Microsoft owning/merging with GM, McDonalds, and Disney. Essentially, the companies inside the organization are spread out over a very diverse area. This is to insure that when one industry, say automobiles, has a slump, others industries undergoing a boom, like consumer electronics or a theme park, can help support the ailing businesses with capital. Basically, all of these companies work together for a singular goal: the almighty dollar (or yen).
Sony, being a member, and a leading member no doubt, of their organization, would have some very good reasons to buy Sun, above and beyond the diversification reason listed above.
Firstly, the server side of the business. Tech geeks know and respect Sun's servers, even if they aren't always their first choice. Also, Sony has immense brand name recognition. This can be useful when management is trying to decide what hardware to buy, and since the atypical pointy-haired bosses may know jack about linux, NT, UNIX, they will recognize Sony.
Secondly is the consumer electronics side of the business, specifically handheld devices, like PDAs, MP3 players, etc. Remember when Java first got noticed in the mainstream, there was tons of talk about how soon we'd be driving cars with a Java OS inside, dialing phones run by Java, flushing toilets run by Java, etc., etc., etc. Sony may be looking at the possibility of aquiring a company with at least some experience, and a lot of potential, in writing and implementing embedded software for Cell phones, PDAs and whatnot. Microsoft does it, Linux sure as hell does it, Apple does it, so why not Sun? Sony might be thinking.
Finally, Sun is cheaper than hell right now. Like the article says, $3.00 bucks a share is an incredibly attractive buyout price for a company Sony's size, and at that cheap a price, a risk could be taken with the company, and a posible failure, while bad, would barely be a blip on the corporate accounting tables.
So, no matter what your stance, you have to admit that, when the facts are reviewed, the idea is, at the very least, interesting.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
It would be interesting, except for the fact that the two companies, as has been stated, have little in common. Sony is consumer and Sun is all business. I've been in meetings with Sun staff, just the last week (in Asia...not in Japan), and no one is looking that direction. Any talk like that is just conjecture.
Sun may be nervous, but they aren't running scared just yet. They are already more active now than they were this time last year, and they know what they are facing in the market.
If the marketing wonks can lay off, Sun will be around for a while, and that doesn't mean as part of another company.
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.
Looking at the current Java-based code developed since 1995, it can be taken for granted that Java will stay. There are huge investments in running Java applications at banks, insurances, e-business companies (IBM). Just like Cobol, Java will probably loose market share while the C#/.NET environment will rise. That's only fair - now there is a modern alternative besides Java.
And I don't understand why people are always complaining only about runtime performance. Java development speed is fast. Java code is robust. Java libraries are so good they are 1:1 ported to C# (JUnit, log4j). Java IDE's are incredible productive. Java can be used over all tiers (JSP, Servlets, Beans, Enterprise Beans).
Even with performance 50% lower than "native" C/C++ code, it probably performs better economically than any other technology.
So, still, Java is the best for mid-sized to large projects (besides C#/.NET).
Looking at Java, let's see. For me to use it, it takes a whole number of patches, that I have to agree to the terms to download, then it takes sun's linux version or source version or whatever, that I have to agree to, then I have to let it compile and all that crap. And it still runs slow, and blackdown's crashes instantly. No, I'm not on Linux, why do you ask? I'm on FreeBSD, which sun could care less about. Where-as Parrot plans on support just because it's written in C.
Just my 2c, trying to get some more coders or interest for a project that could certainly use it. =) Thanks for reading.
You can't (well you can, but I'd rather drill a hole in my hand) script an enterprise app in PHP. Yah, PHP is great for a scripting language, but it's just that.
:)
I grow tired of everyone predicting or shouting for one thing over the other - there always has to be just one. Yah, right.
PHP is great for the non-ASP/*nix programmer. ASP (and I'm choking a little here when I say this) is great for the m$ programmer. C is good. Java is good. Jeeze, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. I'd much rather have a CHOICE when using a particular technology than not.
The Java VM exists for a reason. Just because PHP doesn't have one doesn't mean much. They're both written in C too - so what!
In the end, sure the user wants the most responsive app. But I'll say this, get a big project and try to have multiple devlopers script it and it'll probably die on the vine. You can do just as bad of a job with JSP (and believe me, I've seen it) but there are some really great frameworks out there that help fix problems like this.
Plus, with PHP and the like, they're tied to HTTP. It wouldn't be a very good idea to script a server app in PHP with multiple different types of clients accessing it. It's possible, but I can't see someone writing a Win or Linux native client that accesses a PHP server app. Java works well with the web, but is not build solely for it.
Plus there are other things, if you wanna compare (I don't know even why I'm doing this). There is no PHP message queueing, no or little 'enterprise features', no 'compile PHP to a console application', no PHP 'enterprise' transactional components, etc. Anyway, anyone who's ever had to really use both knows what I'm talkin about.
And besides that, for me, *nix and network programming are still like wide open spaces to me. There are still plenty of things to discover out on the Montana plains and I'm not gonna get all bent outta shape about a rock not being a tree and a tree not being a clear blue sky.
The segway; Sun is all about proprietary (13W3, sbus, solaris) - this is why they may make a great pairing with Sony. Sun could be to Sony, what the Xserve market is to Apple. It could be Sony's opportunity to be recognized in the corporate world. Apple and Sony share the exact same "creative market" - those don't buy Apple in the market, tend to want Sony A) brand, B )it's the same brand as their other equipment, C) Looks, D) Integration & Media nature of their product
Conversely, I have always thought Sun would be a good merge with Apple. I think Sun would be best getting away from almost TOTAL proprietary, allow Apple's genius to help with development of Java and further integrate it in to Unix/BSD, and give Apple some of the best blade technology in the industry, and possibly a stronger development partner for RISC processors.
I had even come up with a good slogan for a Steve Jobs Keynote; "Every Apple Needs a Little Sun To Grow!"
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Sun do have serious trouble in the troubled economy. They definitely need money to survive. And they need more to safeguard Java (licences) because what they get from Java is less than what they invest.
Java has future and will stay. Big companies like IBM, Oracle invested a lot in Java because they did see that Java has future and will stay for long time.
I don't thing Apple or Sony will merge with Sun, because IBM and Oracle will not stay calm as they want Java, a conclusion arrived by looking at what they invested in Java softwares.
Five years is not far off and at the same time it is not as short that Sun cannot do anything. Sun do have a chance if it wants to change. Sun should look for the growing markets ( Desktops, Notebooks, Low end Servers ). Does Sun have money to start on a new market? Hope so.
The conclusion, if the same situation continues, Java will stay, Java will change hands, Sun will merge or will be bought. And also, Sun still has time to revive.
- Jay
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I don't know exactly what Sun should do to save itself.
A long description of a problem without a clue about the solution shows lack of understanding. The author's able to see that there is a problem, but doesn't know what it is. Why should I believe his predictions?
I copied this sig.
I have never used it but I heard its more object oriented and better then Microsoft's CLR so its not a total copycat of
http://saveie6.com/
Unfortunatly for pallidium enabled security .NET may the only solution for e-commerce. Java will be a tough sell since it can't be trusted or certified by Microsoft. If its not trusted then its not secure. So yes Microsoft-approved-certified-blablabla is what corporate customers will be forced to use to remain competitive and secure.
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
To all those Java programmers, don't worry it is all fine, Sun maybe gthe past but there are big market with Java and IBM has put quite a lot of eggs in the Java basket.... so does BEA, HP, etc. It is being though in university as the programming language of choice, so you have all those up coming Computer Eng/Sci grad who is fluent in Java. Now beat that C#....
Java is a nice lovely language. Bar all the silly Swing/AWT APIs it is still very structured and quick to knock up a prototype, and easily to get things going. The VM implmentation may be bad at the moment but I am sure once Sun has loosen the control of Java (maybe get bought out or something), couple with a decent VM implementation C# may not be as attractive as it seems!
Sun is already trying to move into a different market: Desktop computing. They still have this powerful card called "OpenOffice", they are big GNOME fans. They have an excelent guide for porting software from Solaris to Linux.
Looks like they're trying to make it really easy to push for a move from SPARC/Solaris/CDE to ix86/Linux/GNOME.
Or will Java developers have to swallow hard and submit to the whims of the dark overlord?
or they (we?) can just use the far better alternative for OO platform ind. development: Python. It's open source, it's vastly extendable, simple to use... Python has it's quirks, but IMO it's better then JAVA in just about every aspect. check out www.python.org, and while your at it check out www.pygame.org aswell for a really nice multimedia layer for python (maybe it's just an interface to SDL or something, I'm not sure how it works, but it does a really good job)
I think to understand what is happening to Sun one has to look at the market.
Just recently the Java vendors have noticed that Open Source has taken their share of sales. And this makes them nervous. Sun, which has fought with Open Source is falling into the same problem.
Open Source is making inroads into the market. And the problem with Open Source is that it kills, nullifies the traditional software market. By traditional I mean give money get software. Open Source opens different markets and some people are coping, eg IBM or RedHat, etc.
When I see this I truly do see the end of days of MS. That is IF MS goes this route. If MS decides to accept Open Source, then things will probably change. But I see MS going the same route as Wang. Wang a now dead company that had truly interesting technology and products. But a company that failed to adapt to changing times. But before that happens it is going to get TRULY messy with IP (in America thought).
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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.
Sun products are not any *special* improvement of Sony products and vice versa. Sony products usually do not need any servers, but when they do - other cheaper and still good servers around (read: Linux). And of course, who needs any Sony products in the server room?
Apple has already been bound to IBM and Motorlla through PowerPC. Typical Mac applications (graphics) doesn't require big database and internet servers, where Sun is still strong. In fact, typical Mac users are geeks (it was so hard to avoid typing "jerks") and not corporate users. But if otherwise would be - IBM servers are not far away.
Both Sony and Apple has no traditins of picking up failing former giants and digesting their dead meat.
But there is other company, which has very long tradition of squizing the last juice from the dying things: HP. They just bought Compaq who bought DEC. Why do they do that? Because their business model is based on support, specifically on supporting customers with legacy system, who doesn't have (almost) any other choice to get that support of their already dead platforms. But that business model requires new victims every few years.
Besides dying expensive hardware, Sun and HP has another in common: system management. Both have good ideas, both did not implement it well, at least as good as IBM did. So, by combining system management platforms from both, Sun and HP can make them a stronger competitor to IBM on that market segment.
As for Java... Sun will let HP to suck the last possible money from IBM on Java licensing. Of course untill IBM will drop Java finally and move to Python (I would love to see Eclipse for Python!). And I won't be surpised to hear that HP or Sun or merged HP-Sun, will buy Borland together with Together :)
Personally, I can bet that if in coming year we won't hear about upcoming plans of HP-Sun aquisition, then we shall hear about HP planning to acquire SGI. But any speculation about that merge would be a kind of offtopic here.
Less is more !
The real problem with this analisys is best seen here:
:))
Cheap Intel and AMD hardware running Linux is going to kill Sun unless the company does something so stop it, which they aren't
This comment is so clearly comming from a journalist, and not from someone who ever done some real work. To explain:
x86 is a 32-bit architecture. It has a 4G RAM limit which you just can't help. There are ways to put more than that - but you can't have a single process which uses more than that. There are also problems with the fact that x86 doesn't scale well above 4-8 CPU's and others - but this is the main issue. Now days there are simply too many problems which require datasets larger than 4G, both on workstation, and on servers - scientific, database, just to name a few. Now we all now that both intel and AMD are going 64, but... Would you base your buissines on a brand new platform, no one tried? Well, neither would most others.
There are other issues here - sun is known for great service and reliability of their machines, but the main issue remains within these 64-bit. PC's, and mac's (for now) just can't cope with that. There are moves forward, but no one has tried them - and that's the bottom line.
http://www.sun.com/hardware/serverappliances/
Sun left well enough alone and didn't change much about this product, including letting it run Linux and on an Intel platform.
This put them in a nice spot with previously invested companies like Rackspace and other hosting providers that survived the crunch.
Diversification is a successful investment strategy.
Even Java is becoming superfluous. Java is the Dan Marino of software. Just as the former Dolphins quarterback, Java affected the world so much that history cannot be written without its mention. But nonetheless, neither Java nor Dan ever won the big one.
Blasphemy! I saw Mr. McNealy speak at JavaOne last year, and as he remarked that Java had now become the most widely used programming language, he put up a slide saying "Java Won!". It's everywhere! How can this fool say that it never "won the big one"? Since 1.4 was released, all the objections to its use have been made irrelevant: speed (thank you, HotSpot), user interface (Swing now really does look and feel the same on all platforms)... well, I can't really think of any other objections, anyway. Bottom line: be as negative as you want about Sun, but Java is not in trouble, it rules the world, from cell phones to mainframes!
So, where have you been in the last 5 or so years?! If you read Judge Mott's ruling about the Sun vs. M$ case it clearly shows that m$ abused yet another contract with another company.
.NET, and C# for that matter, might be a better development platform than VB and such, but they still have the same 'fuck the world at everyone's expense' mentality behind it. I've learned that the hard way.. Good luck!
The reason he is forcing them to bundle it is because they did cause harm to Java in more ways than one and that deserves a correction now instead of worrying about it later; as was the case of Netscape. Argh! Ya know, you need to get your shit straight and present the facts when posting stuff like this. Sure, someone reading your post would be like "yah, market forces dude! What are we now, commies forcing successful companies to carry stuff they don't want?"
Gee, and oh yah, weren't they already convicted of being a freaking monoploy?!?! Um...
I've been developing with Java for 7 years and while it's not perfect, I'll never go back to m$ development for many reasons.
- They're a highly unethical company. for a small taste see here, here, and here...
- Like someone else said, profits first, users second
- Welcome to a m$ only development world. I applaud the Mono guys and the dotGNU guys, but just wait until m$ wants to flex its patent muscle. Profits first, lock in second, whatever after
- Bugs & security. Welcome to the jungle
- Horrible, god awful, slave, er, customer service
- Service pack # 539.. and counting..
- Worms, attacks galore and shotty patch record. Just that alone would make me steer clear of that platform.
Java isn't the holy grail and I'm not looking for that. But its developer community is much better than M$s' and has its roots in the *nix world, which frankly, I'd rather have my foot in than the DOS world.
Oh, and by the way, before I bailed from ASP/VB/<fill in other m$ crap here>, I was in a constant state of perpetual screwed-ness with M$ products!
michael, jlowery or Robert X. Cringely?
'Be the change you want to see in the world' - Al Gore
Not only too much IBM investment, there is too much IBM CUSTOMER investment. Now that the big financial institutions have implemented Java apps it will never die. Look at COBOL.
While Sun has tried to compete with MS and IBM, they haven't been successful. For one, they have no application server. Yeah, they have "iplanet", but who is doing development for this platform? Nobody. Currently, enterprises are deciding between .Net and Websphere for the most part. Many companies are also consolidating their hardware purchases, and I can tell you, they are not consolidating it into a bunch of Solaris boxes. Sure, Sun may have a stronghold here and there, but on the whole companies are getting rid of their Sun machines. Ford, for example, just decided to turn their entire hardware purchasing to IBM. That means the several thousand workstations and servers they have from Sun will all be gone in a year or two.
Java, contrary to what some of you have posted, has a solid piece of the market. This is largely due to companies like IBM, who have provided compelling development tools and deployment platforms. Many enterprises are looking at Java as a way to keep their business logic in a relatively vendor-neutral place. So, Java is not going anywhere. But, I can't see that it is going to do Sun much good. Amazingly, Sun has some of the worst Java tools available.
So, Cringley's article is not a troll or a flame, he makes some sober observations about a company that has been losing relavance for some time. He is absolutely correct when he says they need a visionary. Joy and all those other guys are not filling that role. Sun needs a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs. Someone who will wake that company up and say, "Screw servers, we're losing our ass there. Let's do embedded devices!", or something. Anything but what they have been doing for the last several years.
Among its processor architectures will be x86, SPARC, Alpha, IA-64, ARM, and 68x00 (Palms and old Macs).
How does it run on Mac OS X? only on old macs? How about new Macs?
If something doesn't work on all of these, we can't use it in Parrot.
If Parrot doesn't run on PowerPC (especiall on Linux/PPC), we can't use Parrot.
And I thing MacOSX geeks would agree regardinf PowerPC/MacOSX.
Less is more !
I read through this thread and the thing that I kept thinking was: "These kids haven't worked on an RS/6000 recently have they?" Now I will admit that I was indoctrinated into AIX goodness over a year ago, but with Linux/Mac/Windows eating into the workstation market (which is taking market from ALL the players in that space) With the rise of linux/gnu stealing profit from the OS and developer tools business, and now IBM mounting a full frontal assault on the high-end.
To the poster upthread, Sun hasn't captured the hearts and minds of CIO's, Oracle and SAP have. When/If Oracle ever migrates to a different platform for their primary development that will be the nail in Sun's coffin. That's really what is keeping Sun in business these days. The question for the next 5 years is if Sun can transition it's business model from providing expensive big-iron as their primary money maker, to competing with IBM in the high-end and Linux in the low end. They're in somewhat of Apple's problem. Their processor has lagged against the POWER series at the high end, and the PIII/IV at the low end. The Mid-sized market is such a cut-throat environment that Sun can compete there, but it's a hard sell for everyone. As much as we hate monopoloies, Sun needs to find a niche that it can dominate (like SGI) to have a rudder to give it stability.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
as an aside. i think everyone out there who has contact with sun somehow sees this one in the works. i have a cobalt server, and the guy who was the engineer in charge of the list got canned. i'm sure they're aware of the implications of keeping managers and canning engineers, but you can only get away with so much of it before your company goes, POOF, and becomes a Geek Story. "There used to be this company that made . . . .. " We'll miss em, hope that maybe IBM buys em out or somethin.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
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.
Sparc isn't proprietary. That's why Fujitsu makes Sparc systems that run Sparc Solaris.
http://www.sparc.org
``submit to the whims of the dark overlord? Maybe I'll switch to Mac development, after all."''
Why is everybody so upset about Java dying? OK, on paper it was quite a good language, but in practice everything that could go wrong did go wrong: horrible performance, incompatibilities between versions (think AWT), bloat, you name it. Obviously Java doesn't live up to the compile once, run everywhere paradigm, its main selling point. If you need different code on different platforms anyway, you can as well go for native binaries, which will perform better and possibly look better, too. However, it's hard to go that way with Java, because of lack of native compilers. That means that Java is pretty much doomed (although it seems to be getting a second chance on handhelds these days - makes me wonder if they weren't slow and low on memory enough yet without running a JVM).
However, this doesn't mean we have to surrender and capitulate to the Great Satan. Ever hear of Pyton? It is very similar to Java in that it is an object-oriented language with garbage collection, and can be compiled into platform-independent bytecode, which can then be interpreted on any platform. However, there are some important differences. One is that the Python interpreter is open source and has been ported to a wide range of platforms, providing identical functionality (save for some platform-specific extensions) on each of them. Most of the functionality is provided by high-level, native binary modules, making both coding and execution fast. With few modifications, Python programs can be compiled to native binaries, should the need arise.
I am not a Python expert, so there may be inaccuracies in the above, but I do know Pyton is Here and Now. I see no need to give up the fight if we have such a good weapon left. Python needs work, but so does the competiton. So instead of whining, get going!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This is coming from the guy that thought the next version of Windows should be built on Linux.
Allow me to quote him:
"Windows XP is not an operating system"
"The idea of Windows as an operating system is purely a product of the Microsoft marketing department..."
He then goes on to say:
"Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there..."
Quotes from the Cringely column:
"Scott McNealy will have to stumble on a new business just as he stumbled on servers and Java. This means getting new and energetic technical leadership for the company, which desperately needs another Bill Joy."
"McNealy has to
I've been studying issues of this nature for more than 30 years. What has happened to Sun has happened to Microsoft and Intel and other companies. The leaders become tired. The human brain cannot do essentially the same thing for many years without a serious rest. The human brain cannot operate in a healthy fashion if it is always being told what to do; the brain needs plenty of time to connect everything with everything else.
Cringely is not a deep thinker. He once set a goal for himself to design and build a new kind of aircraft in a month. He wasn't successful, or course.
Basically Cringely says that Scott McNealy should put a huge amount of new brainpower into Sun. On the surface this is a good idea. But it is an idea that is always true, like saying that if starving people have more money, they will eat. It is always true that a company can use more brainpower.
Effectively, all Cringely is saying is "If the problem goes away, the problem won't be there." Or, "If Sun has more brainpower, Sun won't have problems with lack of brainpower."
The real problem is that Scott McNealy and other executives don't understand the limits of the human brain. They believe they can do more with their brains than is actually possible.
The brain is subject to the limits described by Gestalt psychology. If a person stares at something long enough, it disappears from consciousness. Basically, Scott McNealy cannot hold the issues of growing a computer company in his consciousness for many years without periodic serious rest.
Gestalt is a German word for the phenomenon of how events or ideas connect in the human brain. Since wisdom is connectedness in the brain, the phenomenon is extremely important.
The phenomenon of perception is described in the book, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality ,
by Frederick S. (Fritz) Perls, Ralph Hefferline and, Paul Goodman. This is the only book of which I am aware that describes the ideas of Gestalt psychology clearly.
There is apparently some sense inside Intel that Andy Grove got cancer because he overworked himself; at least Intel employees readily accept this idea. Intel has serious problems now with marketing. The lack of good marketing is limiting the company's understanding of how to find the necessary new technical directions. There is no one at Intel now with the brainpower to see the problems or resolve them.
Microsoft has the same problem. Microsoft executives are slowly destroying the company by being adversarial toward their customers. But Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are tired. They have been doing the same thing day and night since they were young adults. They simply don't have the brainpower to recognize the problems and fix them, particularly since fixing the problems in this case would require that they resolve inner conflict that they've had since childhood. (I wrote an article that discusses some of Microsoft's adversarial behavior: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.)
The problems at Sun are very common. Fairchild Semiconductor and Novell, for example, destroyed themselves in the same way. The executives reached a point where no amount of pressuring themselves could result in more useful brain activity.
If you are wondering who might buy them out, here's my guess: Fujitsu.
As for what they have in common, see: . 'Tis ironic though, that the former Amdahl mainframe company could end up engulfing Sun. Heh.
I read Bob Cringely's columns each week on both PBS and InfoWorld because I like his fanciful take on the things he writes about. But when he comes up with these pie-in-the-sky scenarios, he's almost never right. Just as he suggested Apple would/should port OS X to X86 and Microsoft should replace the Windows kernel with the Linux kernel. Just plain nuts. It also looks as though he compared notes with Charles Cooper at CNet/ZDNet
I think Sun only has to lose their emotional attachment to the Sparc processor. They have too much else going for them.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Apple needs to to add serial port access to the OpenFirmware. When you ask Apple engineers about this feature, they will reply "We hear that a lot from 'Sun people'." This is one of the only things I can think of that Apple could gain from a meger with Sun. It would also give them a bit of clout in the enterprise market. Having said that, I don't think it is a good idea. Sun is losing marketshare at an alarming rate. I know of at lease one company that was primarily a Sun shop that is in the process of replacing all of their servers with IBM/AIX and Linux boxes.
-- Charles A. Plater
Okay, just eating the dogfood of the hypothetical argument, let's presume Sun goes off the radar for some reason, leaving Java to stand solely on its own merit.
.NET CLR. All abide by the same concept; build a lightweight, low-level virtualization that functions well on 'real' hardware; don't (completely) strap the VM to one language, whether in design or marketing.
What you end up holding are two things:
-The high level language. Not a bad effort, and rather well-known, even if facing competition from Ruby, Python, Perl, C#, and even C++. Everyone has their reasons to love/hate languages, but I'll argue that, on the broad scale, Java is faiiirly 'clean,'* and will always have a niche as a set of semantics for telling computers to do stuff.
-The JVM. As a crossplatform solution, it's suboptimal across "all" hardware, though various non-Sun implementations have found ways to eke out better performance. Can anyone name an architectural reason to keep faith in the JVM, and opt for processors 'built' for Java? This is an honest question; does implementing whatever those opcodes are advance computing in any way?
If there's nothing Insanely Great lurking under the covers, perhaps it's time for the crossplatform field to "advance" to solutions tuned on a lower level. As an Amiga nut, I've been following Tao's Elate/Intent products, the ill-fated open source Internet Virtual Machine (which is said to assume that All the World's an x86- oops!), and the
---
So, what I'm trying to say is, Java's death could be *good* for the industry and design as a whole, if it forces us to replace it with something better. The CLR probably isn't particularly better, given the whole 'mark of the beast' aspect plus general bloat, but approaches like Tao's are compact, fast, and exist today. In that case, cutting the VM down to the bare minimum- theirs uses only a few k in binary form, allowing most of the environment itself to be kept in machine-independent code- actually lets you leverage the crossplatform aspect by appearing on new platforms quickly.
[Okay, as a bitter OS/2 -> FreeBSD user, I've gotten the impression that Sun's vision of 'everywhere' has narrowed to "Solaris, Windows, and just enough thrown bones to keep the Linux users happy."]
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.
Amen. To put this in perspective, 5 years ago the dot-com boom was just getting off the ground. If you think you can predict *THIS* industry, I have some stock options I would like to sell you.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Whaddaya mena, "Faded Sun"? The Sun's steadily brightened ever since it reached zero age main sequence, 5 billion years ago. :-)
Sun hardware -- like that of other workstation vendors from the early nineties NeXT, HP and SGI -- used to be the absolute balls. Those machines were built like brick shithouses; you could hammer nails with an old Sun keyboard. Now, the flimsy Taiwanese crap they ship is just commodity PC junk marked up to ludicrous prices only a Lockheed Martin would pay.
Let's be honest, Sun is a deeply arrogant company and Solaris has got to be the ugliest, most antiseptic and lifeless computing experience a human being can have forced upon them. It's a chore not to go start raving insane from the cold, clinical dullness of it all.
Sun could use Apple, alright, as Apple at least makes their computers with actual human beings in mind. Sun machines feel like they're built for robot accountants.
There is simply no reason to accept this crap anymore. Like Java itself, Sun has become a bloated, self-important waste of time. Adios amigos! You will not be missed.
NeXT!
Glin
You are absolutely correct, but you miss the really big reason why Sun will not merge with Sony. The company that needs to merge with Sony is Apple. When you get right down to it, both are essentially consumer electronics companies right now with some distractions tacked on. (For Sony, it's the entertainment division; for Apple, it's the endless fight for survival.) If you merge Sony and Apple, though, you get something very interesting:
I think the big weakness after the merger is that Sony really doesn't have a printer line, but that's okay; they'll be able to pick up the dried up remains of HP for almost nothing in, say, 2 years.
Babar
Don't fret.... just go with borland tools, like Kylix/Delphi.... I know you are limited to Windows/Linux... but who knows... maybe a Mac Port will be in the works if Apple can get critical mass.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
The details of their implementations of sparc *are* proprietary. That's what all the USIII NDA OpenBSD stuff is about . . . .
I have been looking at Sun's slow burnout for a while now, and realized that one of the biggest things hold ing Sun back is the cost of Solaris. Sure the OS is free on smaller Sun systems, but administration costs are getting insane. Solaris is a heinous kludge of BSD and System V. The OS has multiple versions of important programs running out of /usr/bin, /usr/sbin/, and /usr/local/bin. Documentation is a mess, because many of the Solaris man pages are just too complicated to comprehend in a hurry, especially for junior admins. Sun's native administrative tool, admin tool, has been wacked in favor of the Sun Management Console; an beastly java version of admintool that runs slowly and has a heinous interface. Learning to work with all of this stuff takes a very long time, and a lot of employer-financed education. Salaries for Solaris admins are always rising, and unappreciated/undercompensated sysadmins are a favorite target of headhunters. Running a Solaris shop is terribly expensive, and that has been hurting Sun for a while.
But Sun has an easy way around this problem- free software. Solaris 10 needs to abandon all of the old stuff, and rework Solaris around the GNU/Free Software tools that many Solaris admins and plenty of Linux geeks already use to run their systems. Dump Sun's X for XFree86- configuration is easier. Dump old versions of vi and grep for vim and GNU grep. Kick out SMC and bring in Webmin. With some serious work, Solaris could come out as easy to administer as OS X or Mandrake Linux - drastically reducing the TCO of Solaris systems. Combining the lower cost of Sun's x86 workstations with the lower cost of a Solaris designed for sysadmins would do wonders for Sun, and be a great start in turning things around.
They calmly sat back while people kept repeating the mantra that Java is slow (even though it isn't; JIT-ted code and better GUI techniques improve performance markedly), allowing it to lose mindshare to competing products.
.NET and the hype machine is in full force
*WHY* is it up to pointy-haired engineers to have to 'learn' how to 'optimize' their Java so that it performs reasonably well? Why can the language and the standard Sun libraries work *well* out-of-the-box. Java IS slow by default. Great. All I have to do now is learn 'better GUI techniques'. So, it's MY fault that Java is slow, not the people who (1) invented it and (2) put out libraries that don't perform well with 'normal' usage.
Sun is a hardware company and their incentive is to get you to use bigger/faster hardware to make the speed issue go away. Why this point isn't driven home every time people talk about Java being slow escapes me.
Now Microsoft has shipped
No doubt there's hype, but even back in 1995, I could build a simple GUI app in VB which performed reasonably well for the hardware it was running on. Jump to 2003, and I *still* can't use basic Java tools to write a decent GUI app without having to have a fine-grained understanding of underlying threading models. And people were supposed to *flock* to this platform for everything?
creation science book
GCC error message blow. IT's pretty damn good for free, but if you have a few nickles to rub together, most commercial compiler packages are superior.
Blar.
The SPARC processor is covered by IEEE Standard 1754-1994 and licensed by the non-profit organization SPARC International Inc.. You can, for example, buy SPARC-compliant hardware from Fujitsu and run Solaris on it.
Sure Sony sounds interesting. But I don't care what anyone says. You're not going to design huge footprint OS's into personal devices. Sony should develop out its embedded OS, in which, Java is a non-starter.
Why no mention of Oracle? The two huge marketing powerhouses is equivelent to IBM and puts MSFT out to pasture on the Enterprise server area.
And heck, why not IBM/ORCL/SUNW/CSCO as a giga merger.
MSFT's market cap is $258Billion.
IBM/ORCL/SUNW/CSCO is only $40B more than MSFT
There's plenty of justification to this merger. Basically they can say... It's the only way we can compete with Microsoft. Either break up Microsoft, or let us merge.
Then, we're not talking about the Faded Sun. We're talking about the dead Compaq, Hewlitt Packard, Digital.
Thogh it would be nice if they put the screws to Fujitsu-Siemens to get access to their SPARC design... call it "SuperhyperultraSPARC" or "BadAssSPARC" or "TotallyAwesomeSPARC" or somesuch, and use it to hold the Itanium/POWER dogs at bay while they ready the UltraV.
Sun better get moving on improving the SPARC technology, though. They're going up against an awesome company called IBM and given IBM's successful implementation of Linux on IBM mainframe and minicomputer hardware--not to mention IBM's huge marketing muscle--if the UltraV CPU platform doesn't come out in time Sun will suffer from sale IBM mainframes and minicomputers using the POWER CPU technology--including POWER-based mainframes that run in massively-parallel fashion.
As far as I can tell, it seems like the hardware is holding Sun back. Just look at recent headlines, where RISC / expensive unix systems are being replaced with Linux/x86 ones. However, I think that Java is something of the future. If you look at colleges and how they are structuring their computer science programs, you will see that many of them have just recently switched over to Java. I know that most colleges try to stay ahead of the curve and use technologies that will become mainstay in the future. I think that if Sun could find a way to convince people that they need their servers over the cheaper Linux/x86 combination, then they will not fail.
SIGFAULT
And if Sun disappears then you can still buy stuff from Fujitsu.
As I mentioned above, there is more to a machine than the instruction set, and Sun has been forcing NDAs on people who want access to the information they need. TheoBSD refuse to sign, hence the current flap.
For starters, it's W, not mW!
Note I am assuming heat dissipation is the same as power consumption, which is roughly true from what I've read.
UltraSPARC IIICu dissipates 65W with the 900 MHz part. The P4 3.06 dissipates 81.8, but the 2.80 only dissipates 68W.
In other words, the CPUs dissipate about the same amount of heat, i.e. use about the same amount of power. Actually to get the same processing power, you would require more UltraSPARCs so it would be more accurate to say Sun is at a power _disadvantage_ here!
-Kevin
You seriously think that Python and Perl are competing with Java? Java's niche is the Enterprise...Python and Perl can go home and play in the sandlot.
Blar.
Facts about Sun's finances:
Sun Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement
For the record a form of journaling is available by specifying the "logging" option in /etc/vfstab. This has been in Solaris well before ext3 was available for Linux.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Seastead this.
Both Microsoft and Sun have the same basic problem. Charging too much for something that can be gotten for a lot less AND doing so, when times are tough.
All companies are having to look at costs and decide where to trim. This hurts Sun and Microsoft.
Microsoft is charging a horrendous, yet much smaller, price for their products to a massive amount of people. Sun is charging a tremendous price, but to substantially less people.
One big difference between the two is that a lot of Microsoft customers, don't like Microsoft. While, I believe, Sun's customers would rather buy Sun products and services, just can't necessarily afford to do so. If Sun is to have salvation, it simply must figure out how to lower prices substantially, while increasing sales volume dramatically. Alternatively, Sun might try to do the IBM "Services" thing.
As for Java, Sun must reduce the memory footprint. Performance with Java is good enough. Startup times and resource consumption is what holds Java back (at least for Desktop apps). On the server or the embedded side there is no reason not to use Java. Adopting the Eclipse projects (IBM's) SWT would be a brilliant step in the right direction.
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 !
You're describing a classic retreat to the high end.
Sun may not go away, but their market share will continue to shrink and shrink and shrink as the lower end machines gain in capabilities.
Maybe I'll switch to Mac development, after all
That's platformist! (If there is such a thing)
$DEITY bless $NATION
My take is he is trying to 'wake-up' Sun, shock them out of their malaise. Read his book - accidental empires, in which he predicts the doom of IBM in a few years. Now that didn't happen, and I don't think his ideas were all that good either. What Sun really needs is someone like Gerstner to focus Sun's energies. Cringley is a great storyteller, and alos very good at summarizing, in a humorous way, the past. I don't think he has the same ability with the present. But who does? Hopefully Sun will get their act together. I believe they have great technology, but they need to move, embrace Linux, rather than fight it, and also make sure their crown jewel, Java, runs well on Solaris, and they need to... Hmm - hard isn't it?
But as a customer if you ask Sun about their linux support you'll get 2 minute, we like lunux and a 2 hour Solaris/x86 Solaris/sparc dog and pony show
True, but then we here at Slashdot don't like to believe such things really matter.
This said I know of no case where Sun has actually used its intellectual property against someone. A quick google I just did seems to bare this belief out. This is definitely a good thing. To my mind going after another company for intellectual property infringement means 1 of 3 things
1) The other company has done some industrial-espionage type activity and ripped off a large chunk of a new product.
2) You are trying to prevent competitors to you from having a chance to succeed. (Read protecting your monopoly)
3) Your products aren't good enough in and of themselves to stand in the marketplace so you are resorting to intimidation.
Traditional tech firms, still led by their founders, tend not to use such tactics, they seem dirty, underhanded and bad practice - it's your products and name you trade in, let the rip off merchants do their worst, cos they never get it quite right and their products are still inferior.
Hewlett-Packard of old, before the founders stood down, believed in this. Even blatant exact copies of their products didn't raise lawsuits. Can't say the same now. I believe Sun will stick to its current ways until McNeally et-al step down, then it too will go over to the dark side of the "Professional Management Team".
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
I mean, the guy's never wrong! Take this article for example:
"If You Can't Beat Him, Join Him
How Microsoft Plans to Drive Linus Torvalds Insane by Introducing MS-Linux"
Obvioiusly, Cringely does no know everything about Sun. Did you know that they are just about the only company dedicating resources towards async computing? The UltraSparcIII has portions of the CPU that run asynchronously. If Sun can perfect their chip design and come up with a motherboard that can run a asynchronous CPU, Sun *will* dominate in the market. Think about it, a system with no clock chips!
Does this Robert X ever verify his asssumptions?
Come on pole check out Sun's fiancial statements..
Sun made revenue on par with Microsoft and IBM!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Column tagline: "How to Avoid the Almost Certain End of Sun Microsystems"
From the column: "I don't know exactly what Sun should do to save itself..."
Thanks for the insight, Bob!
Bush is a cylon.
I'm sure it will or will be ported to it. It isn't finished yet. Just because a small list didn't involve something does not mean that will be the end all.
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.
No, it's not. Haven't we learned by now that the vast majority of users are too lazy to change their system, and will use whatever it comes with? How do you think Internet Explorer triumphed? (Netscape 4.x may have sucked, but have you seen early versions of IE?) Why did the court rule that MS cannot dictate what icons are on the Windows desktop? Why the widespread objections to MSN Messenger or MediaPlayer being pre-installed?
Having first access to the desktop is a foothold that makes a world of difference in what may be the most apathetic, inert consumer base on earth.
How many non-developers do you know who are willing to download and install Java?
I personally hate Sun's Java.
Ah, good, I'd hate to think you had an agenda.
The Internet is full. Go away.
Is it just me or has Cringley become the new Jon Katz? All he does is post ridiculous, uninformed shit and get everyone all worked up over his outlandish assertations.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
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).
No one at this point is going to move the entire server room to an architecture they perceive as dying.
Every place I worked that bought Sun servers then
had to go out and buy Oracle licenses, and deal with
finger pointing if the OS and the DBMS didn't
cooperate. The companies could combine, save
money on marketing, sell a more complete business
offering.
Problem is, who would run it? Larry or Scott?
There once was a debate in server land tht Sun (and its ilk) lost:
Do you want a redundant array of cheap small systems or one expensive, large, well-supported, "nearly indestructable" system?
Visit your local colo to see the answer.
Viewing Sun's Q2FY03 form 10-Q, looks to me like they almost broke even (that's a loss son) on operations. Then took restructuring charges (a routine event with Sun) and a $2 billion write-down of goodwill to come up with a $2.5 billion *loss* the last quarter.
IBM's income in the latest quarter was just over $1 billion, and income from continuing operations (before extraordinary items like restructuring costs etc) was $1.9 billion.
Sun claims total book value of about $7 billion including $5 billion in cash and marketable securities. It has about 3 billion shares outstanding, so even at $4 per share it's market cap is about $12 billion (it's currently $3.30). When share price gets below $3 it makes market cap close to book value. Can you say hostile takeover?
Do you remember how fast Digital pissed away $7 billion in cash?
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
Now back to Sun. You seem to think Sun's adoption of linux will be easy, quick, and profitable. Okay, so why don't they own the Linux workstation market yet? Has ANYONE bought one of those boxes???
You cite JAva. What are the profits derived from Java. I mean line item profits, not intangibles. You don't need Sun hardware to run Java. You don't even need the JDK. I can download gcj or any of the other umpteen Java toolkits and be on my way.
Enterprise computing is becoming a commodity. There is no counterargument.
Has a nice ring to it. incripshin
Believe it or not, much of IT management still subscribes to the belief that "you get what you pay for." If you work in the field and have ever suggested MySQL to an Oracle shop, PHP to an ASP or JSP shop, or Linux to a Windows/Solaris/HP-UX/AIX/SGI shop, you've heard that statement.
Believe it or not, much of IT management now subscribes to "we're not paying for anything we don't have to". IT is no longer a play pen for execs with too much money to spend. Budgets are getting gutted because no one is seeing ROI on half the crap they buy. I have watched Oracle get bumped by MySQL. Guess what, some people just want a fast way to retrieve disposable data using SQL. This scares Oracle because they have groomed customers into thinking they need an M1 tank when a shotgun will do.
As for N1, don't make me laugh. Sun is not in a position to impose an uber-architecture on anyone's data center. Even Microsoft gets static when they try to get people totally in to the fold.
positive cash flow in billions of dollars?
Personally I can't think of one. Did Cobol? Did PL/I? How about Basic? C?
Database management systems (Oracle) or desktop publishing (Adobe) yes. Where does Microsoft make its money (ok, everywhere).
I don't see Java as the engine of Sun's survival.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
I like Steve. I always have. But giving him an empire with Apple's acquisition of Sony might not be what were looking for right now. I think that Steve should acquire Disney for Pixar first, cheap, to cement his entertainment business (though maybe SDKJ Dreamworks would work as well). After that, IBM would make a nice division for Apple to exploit the corporate world. Then, and finally, Apple can absorb Sony. Great plan. I'm not sure that $4B cash is going to be enough though.
Now please finish this sentence by telling us of your profitable investments in Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing and Adelphia.
WRITEDOWNS MATTER. If you don't think so, don't invest, because you will be gutted by people smarter than you every time. Writedowns tell you that the company cannot handle capital investment. Writedowns tell you that the company is a potential debt bomb (even is Sun has none now). Writedowns tell you that management of the company is unable to make sound decisions that are central to the organization.
I've been talking for 8 years about the decrepitude, hypocrisy, and lameness of Sun. They blew the game with Solaris (a bad bells-and-whistles commercial repackaging of Unix), and proceeded to spend the rest of the '90s sucking hind tit instead of leading. McNealy didn't want to beat Bill Gates, he wanted to be Bill Gates. In the end, Sun is just a distro house that builds its own hardware and doesn't have even the juice IBM had at its worst.
Java can live without Sun. I can now construct a Java environment end-to-end san Sun code. Its nice that Java is popular, but it won't save Sun.
Solaris 9, Gnome 2.
We're putting a middle layer of login systems in this year, as a user environment and it's a toss up between Linux/Gnome on ix86 and Solaris/Gnome on sparc. There's not much in it in price. Other things will decide it.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Another poster mentioned that oracle is pushing linux in a big way, so I assume that handles the software.
Here's the hardware: SGI's altix. Each linux OS image can scale to 64 processors and 512 Gigs of physical RAM. These images can then be clustered, to "span terabytes of global shared memory". Prices start at $70k for 4 CPUs and 36G RAM, and go to $1.2M for 64 CPUs.
Sun's hardware is about four times as expensive.
Business models based around giving stuff away for free aren't a good way to make money. Sun spends a ton of money developing Java, and then giving a lot of it away to people who haven't given them a cent.
Microsoft gives a lot of stuff away too, but the stuff they give away generally only works on platforms that you had to give them money to buy. Anything that Microsoft gives away for free has a chance of making them money, while Sun has a much much slimmer chance of the same.
Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, says advanced robots that are smarter, stronger and better than human beings in every way are just around the corner and that "we may not survive the encounter with the superior robot species."
Well, $2/hr India PhD's are pretty good practice.
And they should rename the merger to 'Sunny' Corporation
Signatures are supposed to be funny?
Haven't we learned by now that the vast majority of users are too lazy to change their system, and will use whatever it comes with?
How are lazy users Microsoft's fault? Why should they be forced to include Java? Quicktime wasn't forced into the windows install, yet it enjoys widespread success. Should Sun be given preferential treatment because they are a bunch of whining suing babies?
Why did the court rule that MS cannot dictate what icons are on the Windows desktop?
Why do you believe its OK for other companies to dictate what is included with windows (Java suit), but it is not OK for MS (who made windows) to decide what stuff they want with windows???
Having first access to the desktop is a foothold that makes a world of difference in what may be the most apathetic, inert consumer base on earth.
Why then, should the company that made that desktop not have first access. Why should MS be forced to prop up java, when it is a direct competitor. If Sun wants java everywhere, thats their problem not Microsofts.
What the numbers don't show. I've seen a few companies here in Europe who were big Sun buyers before the market went boom. These companies were buying a lot of kit based on expected growth. The market dried up, and it turns out they are left with surplus hardware. Now, everyone has tight budgets and they are cannibalizing their kit to keep running. I expect when the I.T. heads get their budgets back there will be a lot of upgrading of those US-II systems. Maybe ... let's hope so anyway.
Why the widespread objections to MSN Messenger or MediaPlayer being pre-installed?
Because these are areas that MS is trying enter by leveraging their monopoly. Without Windows, MS would not have a snowballs' chance in hell of getting into either messaging or media.
Thats why.
BWP
Basically, even if Sun made crap from tomorrow forward and everyone wanted to use something else, there is a certain amount of inertia associated with large infrastructures changing platforms. Legacy software, legacy hardware, retraining staff - how long have we heard the mainframe is dead? Well, my sister programs COBOL and JCL in a mainframe environment 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. And we know Sun doesn't make crap ...
What I am seeing, _even_ in the large conservative banks, is Sun losing
the bottom end to Linux. Though only to services which are redundant in
nature like DNS, HTTP, proxies, these are falling way to RedHat boxes of
various hardware manufacturers like Dell and Compaq. This is why we
now see Sun releasing new servers like the LX50, V100, V120, and the new
blades. They want to be the single supplier and prevent anyone else
getting their feet in their client's door.
No, I disagree. In my opinion, the large Sun sites, i.e. telecoms,
banks, etc., these companies will be upgrading their systems to newer
Sun kit when the budgets allow.
I remember back around 1997 or so, McNealy responded to a question about the persistent rumors that Sun might buy Apple, and McNealy said that the only reason he would want Apple was for the office space (Silicon Valley's low vacancy rates were a big story back then). Now we've come full circle with an Apple-buys-Sun rumor? Haha..
Anyways, Cringely recommends that Sun bet the company on something visionary. I've got a suggestion: get into video servers and video on demand in a big big way. Don't let Hollywood control this technology (MovieLink). Partner with someone (preferrably Apple, which is focusing on standards based (MPEG-4) media)
Not that far into the future, TCP/IP will be the predominant means of moving media across various networks and to various devices.
Damn! I forgot "Redundant"!
too true, i still have 2 boo.com shirts :-)
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
I run a team of 11, managing iPlanet, Websphere, Weblogic etc infrastructure. Of those, only 3 are not either H-1B or converted from H-1B to green card permanent resident alien. But my company (a major computer services - e.g. outsourcing company) is in a frenzy to move work offshore. Canada, Spain, Brazil, India wherever labor is cheaper. The era of the H-1B is waning, the new era is offshore.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
One thing which *hasn't* helped Sun is Oracle embracing Linux. Oracle was always a major driver of server sales for Sun, partly because of the belief that Solaris is Oracle's native platform -- being developed on Solaris, etc. Whether this really matters in a technical sense is academic. But with Oracle downplaying Solaris and talking up Linux so much these days, it has to be hurting Sun's sales.
A cautionary tale:
"Those whom have not studied history are bound to repeat it". Santayana
I was at SGI in 95. We read a number of articles from Red Herring and others on the need to find a new business because our old one was gone.
Execs laughed at it, pointed it out to be false. The company was doing great. TJ promised wall street 50% growth. Gary Lauer chuckled. Ed smirked.
Supporters lambasted the article, the magazine, the author. Other similar tomes appeared. More supporters screamed bloody murder. They pointed out all the problems with the articles, the physical shortcomings of the authors are "real men", and all manner of other vituperative attacks.
After all, SGI has some of the best technology around. It *couldn't* die.
Then the company death-spiraled.
They are about a year or two from final implosion. They have no physical assets, having sold those off to forestall bankruptcy. They sold their IP to others (microsoft among them) to keep afloat. Their best people left. Management remains largely clueless.
So why I am writing this about SGI when the original article was about Sun?
Simple. Substitute Sun for SGI, exec name switches, and slightly alter the facts (Sun does not have killer or even compelling technology, SGI did stuff that Sun still has wet dreams about doing).
The reality is that the Linux based machines, with IBM Global support (or HP support for that matter) behind them are far more compelling from a performance and price scenario than the Sun machines at the lower end. There goes one of McNealy's strategims. Sun used to ship absolute crap to our customer base at 1/3 the price forcing us to discount deeply. Our customers loved our machines but used Sun as a whack-a-mole 2x4 against us. I recall warning one Fortune 100 customer that if they did not perceive our value that they should consider doing without us. They said that they loved the machines, but not the price and that they would continue to whack us with the 2x4. I indicated that we could no longer afford to fund their purchases. About a year ago, this customer came back to me and indicated that they were very unhappy with their crappy Suns and that they wanted SGI back. I indicated that I was no longer with SGI, and that SGI could probably not afford them as a customer. McNealy scorched the earth, set the concept of paying as little as possible for the value, and generally destroying the workstation market. Sure NT had something to do with this, but that became the 2x4 with which to whack Sun. Now it is Linux which is even cheaper.
Sun sowed the seeds for this. It is currently reaping the rewards of what it planted in the customers minds.
I give them 3 years before stuff looks real bad, 5 years before they are bought (or 7 before they go under). Based upon similar experiences with SGI.
Sure, you can disagree with points, predictions, etc. The reality is that Sun is troubled. They have been troubled since the dot-bomb went boom. Their market is being encroached on from below by Linux. Not windows. From the sides by IBM and HP (though HP has its own problems in the Itanic).
Take a lesson from the SGI playbook and learn from their mistakes. The retreat to the high end guarantees death sooner rather than later. The market is always going downstream. You have to innovate and lead to be relevant on this high end, and that is a small market (see the IDC and others numbers). Sun is not known for innovation (Java is not a shining example of it).
One of the problems with this is the massive business case dependence upon Java. Java is, despite protestations to the contrary, a Sun product. There is input into the "community process" but Sun owns the trademarks, the IP, and so forth. This means that when (not it, but when) Sun dies Java's future is quite uncertain. The only way to fix this is to separate Java from Sun and make it a real ISO/ECMA standard. Do it like OpenGL or similar. Sure Sun will play a role. But when it goes away, others can step in and provide continuity. As long as Java remains a Sun product, this will not happen. OpenGL is going strong, and will survive SGI's imminent demise. That is because of this process.
If you are or know a CIO, they need to be quite concerned about this for Java based software. Sun has serious existential problems ahead of it (regardless of the nay-sayers or supporters positions). It is not at all clear that they will survive these challenges. Java and its future are currently tied to Sun. This is a problem, a business risk. It needs to be assessed and weighed.
_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?
I know this will sound like a troll, but it's really more of a legal question: How exactly is M$ a monopoly? No one has given me a good answer to this yet. My basic point is this - I have always been able to buy an OS free PC and load whatever OS I wanted. So how is M$ a monopoly? Standard Oil was a monopoly because it completely controlled distribution and refining. There was NO choice! But with PCs, there has always been a choice.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
First, we are an operations shop, we don't do any code. But the apps side of the house probably doesn't give it a second thought. Most of their code is just-in-time, meaning the client says they need to create some new functions to support the marketing campaign that starts a week from Saturday, and the coders slam something out. So long as it works most of the time and doesn't bring the other apps down, they are happy. Average lifetime of an app here is a little more than 2 years. Remember, this is marketing support, not core business process.
Where you have business-critical applications you tend to find them based on commercial off-the-shelf packages like PeopleSoft, SAP, Comergent, Interlog etc. How do those companies deal with it? Your guess is as good as mine.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
[ an aside ]
> I own scsi equipment myself for my home
> pecee, but today I wouldn't even consider
> buying scsi.
I can relate. I have 2 23Gb Seagate Elite's, a couple IBM SCSI drives, and a Yamaha CRW8424S, and today I just ordered a 120Gb UDMA100 IDE drive to replace all those hard drives ( which are starting to exhibit strange errors ). It was a cool experiment, but I'd really rather have one small drive than a noisy heavy external tower full of concrete-block sized drives. Plus SCSI cabling is an expensive nightmare.
Maybe iSCSI will be the shit someday. Who knows. I'm looking forward to ditching all these Elite23 monsters. Yeah, they were cheap, yeah they are pretty fast, but they are just too much of a hassle to use on a low budget. Time to move on and take advantage of newer solutions.
Clickety Click
Java uses number of milliseconds, expressed as a "long", which ranges from -9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807 (reference). According to my maths, this means we're safe until around 292,269,049AD.
Can anyone remember when our sun is scheduled to go nova? Oh, and this of course assumes people use Java correctly - its still quite possible to write non-Y2k compliant code in Java!
This description sounds like Data General in their dying days. The tragedy of Data General was they kept an accountant on as CEO *after* they had reconstructed themselves around the AViiON and CLARiiON product ranges. The only vision was to find a buyer and cash in. The dying company was left with a middle-managers adept at survival who painted themselves in a corner by sacking staff and closing offices. Sun's saving grace is they still have enough top execs available with a technological vision for the future. Unfortunately Sun PS recently sacked a bunch of long-time techs (read expensive payouts) without checking customer contracts. They are now rehiring after spending hundreds of millions on payouts as there is noone to fulfill the obligations.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Back to the drawing board on providing wealth for my decendants then...
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
.... no chance they have the capacity to provide 24x7, on site engineers and hardware replacements in less tha one hour.
No chance.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... oriented spec like IDE (ATA).
Yep, disk manufacturers reduced disk guarantees to one year only, there are not eliable ATA backup devices and I still can put only 2 device in each ATA bus (or 4, wow, fscking fantastic).
ATA for the enterprise? Maybe, if provided by somebody like Sun or IBM, otherwise stop smoking whatever you are taking, it is clouding your judgment.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You should
a) reparse my post and convince yourself that I didn't anywhere mention something about "ATA for the enterprise". This notion, btw., is completely silly, because you will have a hard time to show me an "enterprise" with more than 10 employees which doesn't use any ATA drives.
b) take a look at various offerings of ATA controllers which offer much more than two channels
c) make up your mind about how the fscking hell the _communications_protocol_ has something to do with _hardware_warranties_