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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."
Sun's current "low-end" tactic of trying to replace Linux with Sun on x86 is going to win a lot of converts. There are a lot of applications out there and companies that are used to Solaris and that installed base isn't going to just go away peacefully.
The biggest argument for converting servers to smaller x86 boxes has been scalability and cost. Linux is a popular way to do that, but many companies have been using various BSD variants as well because they are more comfortable with server vs. desktop oriented software. Sun will do very well in those areas with their new emphasis.
For a company that wants to keep their big hardware on Solaris for some stuff, it makes a lot of sense to standardize on Solaris for their cheap x86 servers as well.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
well, obviously it's easier for someone to cut their teeth on linux, since anyone can download a distro and install it. not so easy with sun/solaris.
but, you're still not going to convince a large, lumbering manufacturing company running decidely unsexy applications to switch to linux. i've worked with a number of clients that couldn't switch from solaris even if they wanted to, because their apps just don't exist for linux (think erp/mrp systems).
plus, if you need lots of processing power, you can certainly set up a cluster of cheap lintel boxes, but why spend the time/money on that when you could just throw an enterprise server in there, and just have it work?
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. --Ludwig Wittgenstein
Focusing on beating Microsoft in any way possible might actually *not* be as effective as innovating and creating products people want to use.
Sun's anti-MS strategy was quite interesting (e.g. it was quite a bit more innovative than just reimplementing the GUI part of windows on top of a big teetering stack of different projects
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
It's servers are too expensive for most tasks. They might be better, but the value for your $$$ is on x86. On the OS side Windows and Linux are kicking Sun's ass. On the hardware side Intel and Dell have created an efficient business model that is increasingly moving up higher and higher in the enterprise.
Sun needs to figure out a business model that will work in the new economic reality. They will either need to be a software company or a hardware one. But like a lot of companies they will probably die off because they couldn't adapt. They were successful once because they filled a market need, but when the market changed they couldn't adapt fast enough.
We have got Suns and Linux machines in the datacenter.
Where is really matters (big database engines, 4+ CPUs, a lot of external storage) Linux/Intel is just not capable of the task. Sun plainly does not have much competition there. At least not from Linux. HP-UX, AIX -- may be (though not here).
What are these whacky analysts talking about? What Linux? 8-CPU, 64bit, fibre storage attached and Linux? Have you ever tried it? I have, I know what a pain it is. It DOES NOT FLY. Period.
What REALLY hurts Sun is Windows on the low end. Not the hardware, not the price, but all these litty-bitty apps, that do not work anywhere but on Windows. Espetially Web apps. All these moronic developers with only Windows experience and mantra "does not work -- reboot it!", "open MS-DOS command prompt window and type c:".
There is Sun's biggest problem. They are lacking in the software, not the hardware.
...because it is what I know.
/etc might be moved around,
You might be doing yourself a disservice, and maybe selling yourself short.
File structures may be different, configuring stuff in
but the diff between Solaris (or IRIX, or OS X, or AIX) and Linux isn't any wider
than variants in Linux distributions. Just running an unfamiliar shell on a Linux
box could make it seem like a foreign machine if that's not what you're used to.
What's easiest for you also might be blinding you to choosing the best box for
the task at hand. I think Solaris tends to have more "torque" under load than
Linux, OS X is better at interoperability with other systems, and IRIX...well, no comment.
There's also the factor of uptime and service contract support. If you spend the bucks,
when a Sun box breaks, they'll get things back in order quickly. Sure you could run
down to Best Buy and get parts for your Linux box, but some places feel uncomfortable
with that, as they should.
Not that I like Sun all that much. They could use some of the modern polish that
Apple has put into OS X. Sun maintenance and installation feels very dated to me.
But they do run and run and run and most anything Linux can do, in the server world,
can be done (often better) with Solaris.
Apple would also gain Java as an Apple supported program and language. It would help better, faster Java come to Linux and OSX. Java could be more tightly integrated into Quicktime and thus into mobile phones where Apple is implementing it's latest builds of Quicktime.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
-- it's keeping them. I went to work for Sun my first job out of school. Our lab had largely Sun workstations and I really cut my unix teeth with Solaris, so the opportunity to go work for them was huge for me. When I went to work there, only 3 people in my group were over 30.
I went to interview at their brand new (at the time) Burlington, MA facility and I was simply amazed at the place; the facilities, the people and the atmosphere was so key in my going to work there (as was the salary they offered). I still think it's a great place to work, especially for people in my age group (I'm 25) who grew up getting used to flex time. That I could take a long lunch, play a few rounds of foosball and go to the gym at 4 in the afternoon made me a happy camper.
The problems began when I started sensing I ought to be moving up (or at least, around) in the company. I started in a position I liked but didn't want to stay in for more than a year or so, and as I started to make pushes to move around I was met with stiff resistance. Management claimed it was because of the economy, but I knew people who moved around and they weren't exactly examples of people who were going to save the company.
The key to this issue was that while Sun was publicly making overtures towards attracting the younger developers, the first and second level managers were only advertising positions for senior engineers and were being very inflexible in "stretching" the job prereq's for younger engineers. I often think the only reason I got a job in the first place was because I came in during one of the last "conscription"-type expansions the company did before the IT sector did its nosedive.
To this day they still have that problem; I often consider going back to Sun because the corporate culture is fast moving, fun and flexible, and I doubt I'll find that in any other company of that size. But the jobs and the people they're hiring now are all mid- or senior-level engineers.
So actually, now that I think about it, maybe it's more apt to say their problem isn't attracting young engineers -- the culture is almost geared towards them (why else would you put foosball tables and a Starbucks in your engineering centers?). The problem is that once they've attracted the young people, they have to get their managers to hire them.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
SUN has two problems they must sort out.
1. Java - there are too many releases and java applications seem to be too tightly tied to specific point releases. This causes huge support problems.
2. SUN supplied h/w to many of the dot.com companies. When they went bust a LOT of 2nd hand hardware appeared on the market. It's difficult to compete with your own h/w at 2nd hand prices.
(Does anybody else find that typing in the form for SlashDot submissions causes Mozilla/Redhat8 to bounce the form around the window for no apparent reason?)
At the end of the article McNealy says the following about linux:
"Yet when talk turns to Linux, it's as if McNealy can't help himself: He knows he should be courting the world's Linux devotees, but instead he pokes fun at them. He points out that Red Hat, the leading purveyor of Linux systems, announced revenue of $24 million for its last quarter of 2002. I don't know where this multibillion-dollar Linux business is."
however, earlier in the article, when discussing SUNs past we get to read this:
"Back in the mid-1980s, when Sun was still a startup, it had neither reputation nor intellectual property, and it faced a murderer's row of competitors. One quarter it even needed to borrow $50 million to make payroll."
yeah well, i suppose a lot of people were laughing at sun at that time too figuring out where 'the money' was. I can't believe how ignorent SUN is towards Linux.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I would automatically question any comparison between Sun and any Intel based platform. However even Sun recognizes the future looks to be Linux on Intel.
We recently performed an internal cost/benefit analysis of Sun vs. Linux on Intel. Our study showed that while Intel platforms are very competetive, they fall behind on supportability. Intel machines require VGA port, BIOS, and keyboard/mouse ports. To provide remote OOB management you end up spending a fortune in cards and/or console managers, that Sun has built-in to their low end equipmnt. By low end I'm talking about a 1U $995 machine.
In fact we recently had a conference call with Sun about their Linux boxes... I told them that if they wanted us to buy Sun Intel Linux machines they would need to dispense with the VGA port and provide the same Light Out Management console port that their Sparc machines have. Which effectively means they need to build an OpenFirmware/OpenBoot machine with a RJ45 console port. Sun's rep stated that they are working on incorporating those technologies into the Intel platform.
So I think if Sun can deliver such a machine, in the sub $1000 category they will end up as the trendsetter for Intel based Linux boxes.