Sun to Build Alternative Desktop ?

murthydn writes " At "Sun Tech Days 2003" Developer Conference in India ,Sun Microsystems Inc Chairman, President and CEO Scott McNealy exhorted Indian software programmers to build Sun's "desktop computer" as an alternative system to Microsoft software architecture .The complete article is here" 'Cuz if there is one thing that will save Sun, its a new desktop platform. *cough*

Comments

what about madhatter???

[stonebeat.org]

i thought Sun was pushing madhatter for the desktop env.

They must be getting desperate...

[nyc_paladin]

Sun trying to build a new desktop platform is like hammering the last nail in the coffin. Why don't they try working with Apple to build out the Apple OS on the workstations and use Sun on the servers. It seems Sun is just wasting time and money on reinventing the wheel when supporting Apple would give them a boost.

Re:They must be getting desperate...

[perljon]

That would be an interesting merger. The reason Sun wants a desktop is because they know the MS is gaining server market share for these reasons:
Executives are familiar with the MS desktop, and they prefer to buy something they know.
Some really cool features of the Microsoft Server are only made available with a Mircrosoft Client (ie, using Explorer to check your Exchange Mail)
Because a ton of people use the MS OS as non-professionals, when they become an IT professional, there is significant less learning curve to work on MS products. (They've already spent years learning the OS on a user level, where they may have never run into a UNIX box.)

Sun doesn't really want to sell desktops. And Apple really doesn't want to sell servers, but thinks they need to in order to compete with MS. That would be a very strategic marriage.

Besides, SUN has always been horrible at creating user friendly interfaces, but builds rock solid hardware and OS. Apple builds great interfaces that are easy to use.

A new company that could use the MS startegies of tieing functionality into have a single propietary OS on the client and server, might actually have a chance at really competing.

Here we go again

[Timesprout]

Looks like the "network is the computer" line is getting a revamp here. From the article the focus would appear to be a thin client rather than a full on desktop. Mc Nealy really needs to let go of this idea if Sun is to progress. It failed miserably in the past and I cant see a compelling reason why it will work now.

Re:Advangates?

[Randolpho]

MS Office kicks OpenOffice.org's ass two ways to Tuesday.

Don't get me wrong, I love OO.o, especially the price, but MS Office *is* a better product, and there's no denying it. It's more mature, all of the many minor kinks that plague OO.o are ironed out.

Re:Not a new platform

[Craig Maloney]

I saw one of these in practice at a Sun field office. It's very cool to see people insert their card through and have their desktop appear on their screens without logging in. In todays corporate environment of people being rather mobile throughout the corporation, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on outside of Sun. Of course it preclused having a personalized workspace and a place to call "yours", but perhaps combining the idea of "home base" no matter where you are along with a personalized workspace would be something I'd like to have.

Re:Not a new platform

[lindsayt]

I have a Sun Netra X1 in my basement feeding four sunrays throughout my house. It's really very nice - I can move from room to room and my session goes with me so long as I have my card. I use the sunrays for word processing, music, video, pretty much everything except video games, for which I have a Winblows box in the basement.

It's really nice, but the Sunray really isn't aimed for home users - I'm an abherration. They're really business TCO-reducers. They require an experienced UNIX systems admin to install and maintain, and they provide a standard UNIX CDE/gnome desktop. Since I'm a full-time Solaris Systems admin during the day and I maintain sunrays for work, it's really simple for me to use them at home. Not so for the proverbial joe sixpack and his wife.

Though I love the sunrays, the whole system would have to be prepackaged and simplified drastically before they would make sense for the average home user(maybe with the Cobalt Raq stuff). I imagine that this new vision of McNealy's must be something totally different.

Venting about Sun

[Trolling4Dollars]

I KNOW I'll get modded down for this, but here goes.

I currently work with Sun products pretty intimately at work. I have to say that while the Solaris OS and it's related contract support from Sun is better than Microsoft's Windows OS and it's related support, I will warn EVERYONE away from SunONE products.

I've been working with iPlanet Messaging Server for about two years and have had some of the most outrageously poor technical support I've ever gotten from a vendor. After the Sun/Netscape alliance ended, Sun got the iPlanet products for themselves. So, the new iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 suite should now be known as SunONE Messaging Server... any day now.

The problems that I've had with this system are so incredibly stupid as to be unbelievable:

-multiple administration interfaces that are half broken. (They actually told me to use one interface to do user deletions and another interface to modify users, and yet another one to add users!)
-dense and very pooly laid out documentation
(Read thousands of pages that barely help you get anywhere.)
-user forums that up until last year almost never worked or archived messages (WHY did they take away the NNTP groups they used to have!!!??)
-inconsistencies throughout the entire system with regard to how one would make changes to mail users or implement new mail domains when hosting multiple mail domains.
-No decent admin interface to the LDAP db. (Their "Java Console" is the slowest piece of shit I've ever worked with. Screen updates take about 5-10 minutes just to get a menu to pop up!!)
-No decent GUI based tools to deal with high volume data in LDAP (I'm sorry, but walking through a text file that describes your users, groups, domains and configuration that is megabytes in size, is NOT realistic! They need a hierarchical representation of data in a GUI based app. And NO... the Java Console is NOT it!)
-Major naming inconsistencies. (Some parts of SunONE iMS are called "Netscape", other parts are "iPlanet" and others are "Sun". None are currently "SunONE" yet. The only excuse I hear is that they are slowly "getting there". !!!??? It's been TWO FUCKING YEARS!!!! You'd think they would have, at least, gotten the mnaming straight and provided on Admin tool rather than the four or five that they currently have, half of which shouldn't be used for certain operations!!)

When I bitch about these things to support, I get the same old tired answer "...iMS is a product that is in development, so it should be expected that some things will be a little inconsistent. Just wait a little longer" I've been waiting two years.

After a recent migration from iMS 5.1 to iMS 5.2, I found that their recommendation was to install the new mail system on a "test box" and run with it for a few months before going live with the real thing. They didn't recommend that I do an "upgrade in place" on our original box if we didn't want to have any downtime. WTF???!! Of course we don't want ANY downtime on a mail system. The techs I talked to said to expect anywhere from a 24-36 hour total working time (read a few work days) of downtime while migrating to the new version of iMS. !!!??? We wound up buying a new box to start clean with iMS 5.2 and then migrated users, groups, domains and mail over. The other box will become our redundant backup system. However, I told my boss that we should NEVER buy anything from Sun again. And you know what? They listened. We are doing a multimillion dollar transistion to a new data base system. The database vendor was pushing Sun, but said that the product would also run on HP-UX. We already have a very close relationship with HP (and history with Compaq and DEC). So... we told them no thanks and went with HP-UX instead of Sun.

Once we've gotten some years of use out of our Sun boxes, they will be retired and replaced with HP-UX boxes.

I hope Sun straightens out the SunONE products. The amount of time I've spent trying to learn that crap could probably h

A nicer desktop would help... but wrong problem

[fortinbras47]

People using Sun machines are NOT using them because they went a pretty way to check their e-mail. They're using them because they need powerful, scalable, reliable machines.

And it seems to me that Sun's biggest problem is that their hardware is really expensive and not that much faster or more robust than linux running on Intel machines. From my own very unscientific and emprical tests, it seems that a gigahertz Sun Blade 2000 handles high loads better than my PIV machine running linux, but that the runtimes of most single-threaded programs I write finish as fast if not faster on the PIV. And you can get a well equipped PIV with linux for $2000 and a Sun Blade 2000 will cost you 10 times as much.

With 64 bit architecture from AMD and Intel etc... the reasons you need Sun are just getting fewer and fewer.

Re:Not a new platform

[oldmanmtn]

The Sun Ray idea is very cool even without the whole "hotelling office" setup.

I can prep a presentation in my office, and then walk over to a conference room with my card and pop it up on the screen there instantly.

I can have a debug session running in my office. If something goes flakey with the hardware, I can bring the whole session into the lab without stopping and re-establishing everything.

If I run into a problem with a piece of code, I can grab my card, walk over to the original author's office, and show it to him on his Sun Ray - without him having to do so much as open a new window.

I can move seamlessly back and forth between my office and the "Internet Cafe" in the next building. I can start writing an email over lunch, and finish it when I'm back at my desk.

You get the portability of a laptop (within the campus at least), but it fits in your shirt pocket.