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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."
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.
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....)
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.
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?
You are right about your comments about Solaris, but are mistaken about Sun's stance regarding your other comments. Regarding the executives thinking that the future is in selling hardware alone, you're incorrect - Sun is trying to sell itself as a solutions vendor - not just hardware, but software and services as well. See http://www.sun.com/solutions/ for more info. Regarding your comment saying that Sun is ignoring high-volume low-end side of the market, again this is not correct - sun has introduced the LX50, and 1U rack mount system that runs linux or solaris (x86). See more about that at http://wwws.sun.com/servers/entry/lx50/
Finally, a word about Robert Cringley - how many times does this guy need to be wrong before the industry starts ignoring him?
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!)
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, $2000 "server" market and clean house Concentrate on selling expensive, quality hardware to people who can afford them. If whatever your sever is doing generates real money buy sun you won't regret it.
You can't (well you can, but I'd rather drill a hole in my hand) script an enterprise app in PHP. Yah, PHP is great for a scripting language, but it's just that.
:)
I grow tired of everyone predicting or shouting for one thing over the other - there always has to be just one. Yah, right.
PHP is great for the non-ASP/*nix programmer. ASP (and I'm choking a little here when I say this) is great for the m$ 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.
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.
What have they done for the company recently?
Seriously, Gosling has been involved in a lot of visionary technology before Java, but none of it got anywhere. NeWs was squished by X-Windows. Gage did net day, but what has he done for the company recently? Come to that what does Whitt Diffie do for Sun beyond consume cafe latte?
Unfortunately there is a major difference between technological firepower and technological leadership. The problem isn't with the technologists, it is with the management. They have simply failled to construct a business plan or environment that can utilise the firepower they have.
In that sense, Sun invented workstation.
My DEC Alpha was far superior to anything sun had to offer. Come to that SGI provided better firepower and a slicker integration package. Sun invented the cheap engineering workstation, mainly for the education market. Real engineers used VAXen. Now VMS didn't survive too well but it was the DEC/MIT X-Windows system that defined the workstation interface in the end.
As the author claims, Sun might be gone; on the other hand, Sun might be ruling the world by then.
I doubt it. IBM is rulling the commercial java space and OSS is rulling the freeware space. There is not much of a gap between the two.
The apple/Sun issue is key here. Apple is very well positioned to take huge bites out of Sun's core server market. They simply don't need Sun technology at this point. All they need is a hot processor - which sun notably lacks.
For Sun to survive it has to start focussing on its business, not Microsoft. Meetings with Sun engineers are painful, you get a 45 minute whinge about Microsoft. Which is pretty sad when they know you are one of Microsoft's closest allies in the industry. Even if Sun makes a billion in the lawsuit they will lose big, the suit is costing them far more than that in lost business and lost opportunities.
The first step to save Sun is to sack McNealy. Unfortunately Sun does not have a Steve Jobs figure waiting in the wings.
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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.