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Sun's Last Stand
non writes "Wired has an article by Gary Revlin in the July edition about the current state of affairs at Sun. He attributes half of Sun's problems to failure to recognize the emergence of Linux, and the other half to their failure to make up with Microsoft, and finishes up with a server price comparison. An interesting read."
People are always predicting doom for Sun and Apple, and yet both companies manage to hold on. Sun's doing much better than a year ago and is selling LOTS of hardware. They aren't dead yet...
I think you can partially blame sun's (demise?) on their inability to attract younger developers. As a (younger) sysadmin, I didn't touch a sun box until I got into my first job. Even then I am concentrating on migrating everything over to Linux because it is what I know. I think the same applies in a lot of cases, especially with the younger-folk. How many teenagers do you see trying out Solaris? How many do you see trying out Linux? I would imagine that Linux would far exceed Sun.
When my boss asks me to recommend a server, I would most definetely recommend a Linux server over a Solaris box simply because I have far more experience with Linux than with Unix.
- tom -
And just like predictions of Apple's demise over the years, it's a load of crap.
While I've seen some adds for Apple servers, I don't know if that's a market Apple can or will thrive in - SUN just doesn't seem to add much to Apple unless they're looking at expanding their business directions.
-- "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" [Oscar Wilde]
What I've never understood about Sun is why they didn't make it easier to install Java on a client machine. If you tried to do it (on either Windows or Linux) you would find that the process was increadably badly designed. Most members of the normal public wouldn't stand a chance installing it.
Did they do this on purpose, or are they just incompetent? I've just noticed that they've made it much easier, but for years it was very difficult, at least for normal people.
Sun was riding on top of the world during the boom periods. The problem was all its new customers were startups. When the recession happened Sun pretty much lost the bulk of its customers.
Only real lesson I see is if you court customers whose entire business model is based on riding an irrational economic wave, be prepared to lose all their revenue input when the tide comes crashing down.
IBM on the other hand kept playing to its usual customers, other big name and stable companies, so it rode out the recession almost completely un-scathed.
Sun Fire V480
Four 900-MHz UltraSparc III Cu processors,16 Gbytes RAM, Solaris 8: $46,995
IBM eServer pSeries 630 Model 6C4
2 x 2-way 1.2-GHz Power4+ processor, 8 Gbytes RAM, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8: $35,944
Dell PowerEdge 6650
Four 1.5-GHz Intel Xeon processors, 16 Gbytes RAM, Red Hat Linux 8 Professional: $24,421
Seeing the expression on people who claimed Linux was not ready for the enterprise: Priceless.
Some things money can buy. Piece of mind and a wad in your wallet can only be achieved by cheap hardware and an even cheaper operating system.
This message brought to you by Open Source. Live free!
---
You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
-- Henrik Ibsen
Linux may be improving but Solaris is too. Sun stock price is rising. Sales are good. New processors are in the pipeline (no pun intended). New people have been hired. The big competition from itanic has failed to materialise. Linux is being sold on cheap PeeCee hardware at competitive prices. Solaris is portable: it runs on many architectures and is available 32- and 64-bit. Most FOSS runs on it (and is provided with the OS). Things are not as bad as you people think.
many medium size corporations are seriously in love with Sun, even if they wouldn't see the difference bewteen solaris and linux when someone would crunch their skull with it.
:-)
Sun still has this magical "it's a sun, so it must be expandable, performant and reliable" thing floating around it. A bit like the Microsoft "it's MS, so it must be cheap, userfriendly and er... cheap" myth.
My guess is that those myths will stand longer than Moore's law. I call it Selderrr's law
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
They are probably the worlds most innovative software company....
And they don't know it. Or if they do they don't know how to capitalise on it. Cracking products, cracking ideas that are at the very edge, but very little go-to-market.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
...here's the crux of Sun's problem!...I've never been able to really get Java working with Mozilla on my box. I don't want to rebuild half of my system to do it either!...Why can't I just simply get an RPM that WORKS!....
Since I built my first Linux box (3 years ago), Java has been a TOTAL hassle in every release. I read little snippets about "licensing" type problems here, lib compatability problems there, etc, all while they are still whining about MS.
The article is right. They seem preoccupied with MS and this wrongheaded idea that somehow they will right the wrongs in court or through the media...get your products working, make them easy to install and put them EVERYWHERE and the problem will solve itself.
Yeah, MS thwarted them illegally, keep whining about that and you will be bankrupt like all the others that MS wronged. Now just get over it, pick yourself up and make it as easy for EVERYONE to install JRE and JDK on ANY platform...be damned with the "licensing" bullsh*t. Like any war, you must win "on the ground" in order to be effective. Give MS a little taste of thir own medicine, give your new Java development studio away for cheap. Who cares if you were wronged if nobody can even install your stuff?
Just my two cents.....
p.s. I'm still without any Java on my Mozilla 1.0.1 install.....
Sun reminds me of DEC. DEC had great hardware, impeccable service and Ultrix rocked. However, they couldn't market. Look where it got them.
I see the same thing with Sun. They are too busy trying to be Microsoft, stabbing their partners in the back, and I've seen service that is not of the usual high caliber.
I predict they will be gone in 5 years (bought by someone else, or just plain out of business).
Linux uptimes comparable with Solaris on busy sites
You do have to remember a few things, however:
1) Linux boxes that have uptimes of 400+ days are still using kernels that have the uptime rollovers at ~497 days, when the 32-bit long unsigned integer used to count the number of uptime seconds resets to 0, and the uptimes returned look like the machine had been rebooted at that point.* This is one reason that you don't see any Linux machines on the Top 50 uptimes page at Netcraft.
2) Consider what Solaris is mostly used for these days: webserver and database server (from what I've seen from experience, that is). The hardware architectures of Sun machines (SPARC processors with loads of L1 cache, fast Ultra-wide SCSI disks, and spectacular memory managment of the SunOS kernel) make these machines perfect for applications where there would be lots of disk accessing going on, such as a web server or a database server.
* I haven't had any machines stay up long enough to see this for myself, but does anyone know if this bug has been fixed, and if so, since what release?
Microsoft is basically using the same strategy with Sun that worked so well against Netscape. Basically they let Sun do a lot of the groundwork and innovating with Java/J2EE, etc. Then MS basically reimplemented it as C#/.NET with a few improvements (ostensibly after learning from Sun's mistakes), and now MS can throw more resources at their version than Sun can ever hope to. As a Java/J2EE and C#/.NET developer I find them very similar, but I just see Microsoft's solution improving at a faster pace than Sun's. From an idealistic standpoint I don't like it, but it's also hard to turn away from better technology. I know Sun isn't all Java, but alot of their solutions incorporate it, and in the late 90s it gave them a real progressive presence that made them a major player in the whole Internet Boom. These days I'm back to thinking of Sun as those guys who make Solaris and those workstations and servers that are kinda slow but still pretty cool.
Sun had a brief respite from the workstation battle due to the enormous server market during the boom. Then the boom faded and Lintel hit hard. Sun is forced to go where Linux cannot, up into the ultra high end with 5 9's and 128 CPU's per box. Perhaps they can survive there, perhaps not. There is at least one other company with large cash reserves but none of its original market left out there: SGI. They are trying to take Linux into just the space where Sun thought it would be safe.
Perhaps Sun can find a place for itself. Perhaps SGI can as well. The question is whether they stay around in anything but name and logo - and in SGI's case not even that.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Unfortunately, Sun's technical innovations have too often been overshadowed by McNealy. He is responsible for creating a corporate culture known equally for its bunker mentality as for its technical excellence. To have lost such a dominating market position so quickly can only point to top management being asleep at the switch. Sadly ego may have put Sun on the endangered list. Once it was clear that low end alternative servers were closing the performance and stability gap McNealy should have stopped the Anti-Microsoft road show and dealt with the real threat.
But only if they play their cards right.
Sun has 1 thing no other big computer-maker has: Complete independence from Microsoft.
If Sun were smart they would slap together cheap parts (may be but don't have to be x86), put KDE (not GNOME) and Linux on it and offer it at a good price.
IBM, HP, Dell etc. can't react that easily because they have to fear retaliation from Microsoft, so Sun could be the only serious Linux workstation maker for quite a few years. Despite all financial problems, Sun has a very good trademark so I have no doubt that Sun could sell a lot of those machines.
Also this wouldn't hurt their server business because those machines would be desktops.
And, in other news...
Microsoft has agreed to play fair...
Apple is dying!!!
SCO now owns the Linux kernel...
and Sun is dying!!!
In all seriousness, any company with 5.5 billion in the bank that is not bleeding money will not be dying any time soon.
Now back to your regularly scheduled program.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Are you living in a cave? One of *the* great things about sun hardware and solaris is jumpstart, the ability to go to the 'ok>' prompt on a sun box (find that on your home PC for me, wouldja boy?), type "boot net - install" and wack, 30 minutes later you've got a box installed that looks exactly like the 200 other boxes ... you just installed.
PuLEASE, if all you want is glitz, don't talk about Linux, solaris, or the *BSDs; what you're really looking for is Fischer-Price.
The reason Apple and Sun hardware/software combinations are superiour in stability, is due to the fact that they are made to support each other, unlike in a windows enviroment, where you have a mix and match of hardware, and software drivers that bring in many inknowns sometimes.
Also, it's nice that Sun has very high end servers that keep running when you have to change cpu's or memory, but everybody knows that Sun can't exist by solely these clients. It's the bulk that makes or breaks you and Sun clearly looses that bulk to cheap systems with cheap OS-es because these systems are ALSO very good. Win2k server or Win2k3 and a dell server will hardly crash, a dell box with Linux or a preconfigured linux server from IBM will also be rocksolid. Why buy sun in those situations?
Oh, and if even a short period of downtime costs you a HELL of a lot of money, you won't buy Sun, you will buy stratus systems or tandem systems (HP has given them another name, same hw). Sun looses also in that area. It's a loose/loose situation for Sun. At the uni, I loved the sun boxes and SunOS, but today I can hardly imagine using one when the alternatives (win2k/xp/win2k3 or linux/bsd) are cheaper and as good as Sun's hw.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Where is the "Eat your own dogfood" principle. Sun has put far too much energy into Java, and not nearly enough into staying competitive with Windows and Linux at a server level. Compare Microsoft who is porting all of their userland into managed mode with Sun who has not released any core component of Solaris in Java.
When Sun ships rm6 in Java and it works well, then maybe I will look at their technology with something other then a short critical glance.
Solaris , Linux, AIX, whatever they are pretty much all the same. At that level it's just a matter of having your favorite piece of software ported over. But it's really ALL about the hardware. Imagine loosing a week of work just because your memory chip dropped a bit and segfaulted your simulation. Sure it would be nice to just run down to your local Fry/ Best Buy for new parts, but how many times have I had to return memory or hard drives because they were pieces of junk to begin with. There comes a piece of mind knowing that when you buy from Sun, they have exhuastivly stressed tested thier machines for the types of failures you repeated see with cheap white box hardware.
KDE? Gnome? Maybe for a workstation, but Sun's mainstay is the server market, where it really, really doesn't matter what kind of eye-candy bloatware window manager you're running. If you're spending tens of thousands (pricing is on page 5 of the article) on a server, you probably don't give a damn about an easy-to-use integrated desktop, as your support staff better know what they're doing with it.
The article didn't breathe a word about desktops because guess what? That's not a Sun specialty. Sure they make money selling high-end workstations, but the bread and butter of their existence is certainly servers. The point of this article was markedly not about venturing into a completely separate area of business, it was about rearranging their outlook and shaping again in a market that WAS completely theirs.
I'll agree with you so far as *someone* should step in and try what Lindows did (well..not EXACTLY what Lindows did, all that crap about running Windows programs aside), that is, a third party completely devoid of any ties to Redmond trying to create a unified Linux desktop system and get it sold at major retailers. I disagree however, that this should be Sun's job. That is a HUGE venture, especially since Sun is not well-equipped to build such machinery, and would be foolish, as they don't have enough capital now survive long if that fails miserably. Think of it, would you risk a gambit betting the farm on a game where there may not even be a way to win your money back (even RedHat boasted only $25Mil in profit the last quarter of last year), and worse yet, you have absolutely no experience in the field? I hope not, for your sake.
--- What
Sun is still selling compelling products, but they have always lagged in marketing skills, it seems. Isn't this the reputation they have always had?
For example, the V210/240 is comparable to a dual-CPU 2GHZ Xeon server--but it also comes with FOUR gigabit Ethernet interfaces and U320 SCSI. It would be a clustering monster (think Oracle RAC). Also, only the newer Opteron servers can compare feature-for-feature (me thinks Sun would do well selling Opterons).
The Sun ONE marketing is a bit confusing, at first, but is basically amounts to all the non-operating system software Sun sells. They are also looking to pull an interesting stunt by delivering all software to a customer and unlocking what the customer buys. This is very similar to how high-end CAD/CAM software sells, and it generally works well.
I think Sun is doing a lot of good stuff. I just hope they weather the economy and keep putting the pressure on Microsoft, IBM, and HP. Sun, whether you like them or not, is an important part of keeping the IT industry in check.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Linux uptimes comparable with Solaris on busy sites
Uptime makes for very good anectodal evidence, but it also makes for a poor benchmark, in general. The reason is that uptime is very much a function of a business' own policies regarding patching, maintainence, etc. These policies have much more effect on uptime than software or hardware reliability, unless, of course, you buy a more expensive hot-swap-even-the-damn-kernel server ("midframe" and high-end Sun servers at $100K+).
Regardless, I agree it is not debatable that both Solaris and Linux make damn fine webserver platforms.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
How did you figure that one out? The Java implementation on Linux is pretty good, the main problem being that they insist you get it from their website and use their installer, which is a pain in the ass. That, and it's not free software so companies like Red Hat won't distribute it. But simply allowing people to package it would sort that out.
The problems they have on Linux are purely legal, and let's face it, if you want to avoid legal problems you definately want to avoid Apple.
Java could be more tightly integrated into Quicktime and thus into mobile phones
Random offtopic advert for Apple? That'll be +5 Interesting then. Desktop Java is basically dead, what with Apple pushing Objective C for MacOS, Linux using C/C++/scripting languages and Windows moving to .NET, Java has been squeezed out of the market. Other than the streaming server, I can't imagine what you'd do with java integration, especially on mobile phones.
Sun may require that you distribute an application in order to distribute a JRE, but I have yet to install a utility on Solaris, SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, WinXP, Win2K, or WinNT that did not allow me to specify the location of my JRE.
The "recommended" JRE shipped by the application provider is simply the one that they've done their testing with.
The only exception I've found is for Java in RDBMS stored procs, which obviously have to run with the JRE that is bound in to the RDBMS.
The fact that most so-called sysadmins are afraid to select a configuration other than "default" says far more about the sysadmin's skill than the product or it's installer.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's worth keeping in mind that stock option incentives are designed to mimic a royalty-based scheme...
The real problem here is the business model (IMHO). Whenever a company is successful (eg: Ford) a large field of imitators popup. Well, Microsoft was enormously successful with their software licensing model -- so now we have a large field of imitators out there attempting to execute the same business model.
Unfortunately, there is only one Microsoft. For that matter, take a look at the consolidated automobile industry -- even Ford is a bunch of companies now (Janguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover, etc.); that industry has consolidated.
The days of prospecting software are over. If you work for a sofware company that doesn't already dominate a significant product segment, then you should get out now. Only a few leaders will be tolerated in this kind of market, especially given the compatibility issues posed by multiple software programs on many platforms.
Sun needs to learn this and then decide how they want to expand their business. They dominate(d) the big-iron in your backoffice server room, now they are getting pinched by others looking to expand into that area (Microsoft, Apple). Make an alliance with one of these companies if you want to grow your business; otherwise, bunker down and focus on delivering the best turnkey server solutions out there.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Forget the stock price and flagging sales, [McNealy] argues, and focus on Sun's record of innovation.
Ask DEC how far that got them.
If this is the tack Sun's management is going to take in responding to criticism, then it may be "Goodbye Sun. Glad we knew ya....."
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Because while KDE improves in leaps and bounds (becoming faster, more integrated) Gnome just took a step backwards by removing configuration options.
Of course offering Gnome doesn't hurt anybody, but if they want to have a chance on the desktop it would be better to load KDE by default.
Actually my opinion is pretty much confirmed by the big inroads KDE/Linux, especially SuSE is making in Europe (already 5%-20% in German non-technical newsgroup posts, Munich, a city of 1.5 million will also switch) while desktop Linux is in a comatose state (less than 5% share in most non-technical newsgroups, no big cities switching) everywhere where RedHat (= Gnome/Linux) is dominating, especially the USA.
The Gnomies can talk all day long how confusing KDE is to the mythical, non-existant "average" user invented by self-proclaimed usability experts, however the *real* users in the *real* world have chosen KDE. Call me crazy, but I consider the needs of real users more important than those of hypothetical ones.
However I feel it would compete with their own OS.. even if it is on its way down. Some company (re: execs) don't like the idea of throwing out their baby.
Actually KDE/Solaris wouldn't be any more expensive than KDE/Linux for Sun, however Solaris doesn't offer anything over Linux on the desktop AFAIK and Linux is better supported (think about consumer hardware), better known and runs on more architectures (Think about Opteron, think about PPC970) so Linux would certainly be the better choice.
That Solaris is doomed in the long term is a fact.
If they didn't do it at that time, I don't know if ever they would. But there IS a good reason, easily worth 2 bucks a share!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."