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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."
Apple should offer them 25% of their current stock price in a buy-out offer.
Burn baby burn. Wait what does this mean for the UltraSPARC I just bought! Doh.
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...
That summary is only half correct. The article attributes the preoccupation with microsoft as one of their problems... not with making up with them (which they still haven't)
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 -
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.
as the leading Unix server seller in the last few months?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Sun has tried to sell me some servers before (this is education, remember)...but in an age of white boxes that do the same thing for a fraction of the cost, I can't really justify it for a small district. They did send me an evaluation of StarOffice (read the article yesterday)...and I might switch some machines over from MS Office...but servers, no way.
And just like predictions of Apple's demise over the years, it's a load of crap.
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.
It does come as any surprise. The Sun will surely fail once it exhausts all of its fuel. Yes, it will take billions perhaps trillions of years, but no energy source is infinite no matter what the marketing hype says. All that remains is for Netcraft to confirm it.
Join Tor today!
There does seem to be a sense of angst in the presentations: just about everyone seems to gripe about the economy. As a long time holoder of Sun stock (ouch!), I can feel their pain. On the other hand, recently a top Micorosft exec was complaining to me about the value of his stock options - everyone is feeling the heat in this industry.
While I have always liked Sun hardware, they are having their lunch eaten on the low end. For example: I just had to replace a server - I went to Frye's and bought a Chineese built Linux PC for $199; after reinstalling my prefered SuSE distro, I have what appears to be a reliable (and very low power use) server - close to free.
It is difficult to compete with Linux and cheap hardware.
Sun does make the point that soon there will be more sales of Java enabled cell phones and PDAs than PCs - still, I don't see how they can make much money in that product space.
-Mark
- Free Java/AI web book at my web site
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 ?
In fact, the V480 has a 3 year warranty, if you add AIX license, 3 year warranty, 8+ GB RAM, the p630 id far more expensive than the V480... it's always easy to cheat... No one runs Linux under Power4, since you loose functionality (dynamic LPARs) compared to AIX.
The Dell machine is far less powerfull (SPECrate comparison) and doesn't include 3 year warranty.
Those prices are plain wrong!
I always wander why Slashdot ops. hate Sun so much and loves IBM... will never get it.
In fact, Sun's is the single company that has donated more lines code in the world (OpenOffice, JXTA, GridEngine, NetBeans, etc.).
News story
Apparently they are going to switch their software to run on Java, giving new meaning to "tape delay"...
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.
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
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.
...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.....
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.
The main thing sun has going for themselves over anyone supplying linux and white box hardware, is stability, scallability, support and availability.
With a Sun package (hardware and software) you have the ability to upgrade both system software components, and hardware (including memory and cpu's) without downing the machine, and in many cases without even rebooting the machine. Whatever it is serving, is always available, even after upgrades (granted, we are talking their high end machines, but for... say financial institutions, downtime is a no no, even a few min can cost ungodly amounts of money). Kernel updates, and software updates can also be made (not in all cases) without even rebooting the system.
There are no linux, or even bsd boxes that can do that to my knowledge, and certainly no windows systems.
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.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
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).
Netcraft's site discusses how they gather the uptime, and states that Solaris, Linux, and HP-UX (maybe more) all will max out in those charts at 497 days, due to limitations in whatever they're using to measure uptime remotely.
The *BSD boxes don't have that limitation, it seems.
I wonder how many boxes are out there where this 497-day counter has "rolled over", and if this figure is accurate given that limitation?
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
And that is moving I/Os. I'm a programmer for a company that makes large scale storage arrays, and Solaris can beat most any other operating system (no matter what hardward) at moving just a bulk ammount of I/Os. We support Linux, AIX, Windows, Solaris, and many others, and Solaris is always a top performer on our tests.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what Sun machine's are good for.
Its not what it is, its something else.
when you're the dot in "dot com". Dot coms crash, you crash.
-no broken link
The Baby Bells used their last mile monopoly to kill the "dot com" folks. The bandwith demands have grown, but not like they could have and they are concentrated in far fewer hands. This has made a glut of Sun equipment. A friend of mine bought and ultra spark, which once sold for $10,000, for less than the price of a high end home computer. There's no way he would have gotten his hands on a deal like that if a healthy and free internet market was working. Bad laws, such as those preventing me from buying California wine, and preventing me from running servers on my cable modem, have also played a part. Established interests are shining triumphant and we all suffer for it.
Microsoft has also harmed Sun's traditional scientific computing business. Microsoft has done much to blow up X compatibility and make communications with Unix difficult. One of the responses has been to move some of the calculations to M$/Intel platforms. This obviously does not work for all calcs, but consider the losses from 3D CAD and a perpetuation of the M$ as a client model. Linux can be a great aid there, so long as scientists and engineers revolt against the M$ Office lockin. They have only to realize that the pain is comming from one location and move on. Most have, but many are loath to move on yet. The support infrasturcture for free software is still growing.
In the end, Sun has much to offer. Their hardeare is first rate and they can embrace free software at any time.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Wow, that's the first time I've ever heard torque used when talking about computers.
:-)
Cool. I'm gonna use that now.
-- 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
Just remember Mark...you get what you pay for. That Fry's "Great Quality" special will probably last for about 6 months, when something will undoubtedly fail. Maybe it will be the crappy Samsung HD. Maybe it will be something on the crappy PC Chips/Not-so-EliteGroup motherboard. Maybe it will be the bottom of the bargain barrel RAM. But something will happen. Let's hope, for the sake of your job, that there is nothing mission-critical on that "close to free" server.
It really doesn't take much more to make a sane x86 machine. Build the box yourself. Put in a nice, solid ASUS motherboard. Get a retail boxed chip, complete with chip fan. I don't know where to steer you as far as hard drives go, but maybe run Linux software RAID 5 with drives that still have 3-year warranties. That way if one of the drives fail you can reconstruct their contents using the parity info. Make sure the case you buy has a decent power supply...Antec, Sparkle and Powerman are good brands to look for. Get Crucial or Kingston or Mushnik or Corsair RAM. It's really not too much more expensive than the Fry's no-name crap special.
Really, for a few hundred dollars more, you could have something other than a disposable server. It will certainly cost you less than a Sun, that's for sure. Or an IBM, for that matter. Spending a little more money to save in the long term is a Very Good Thing (tm).
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-06/sunf lash.20030605.1.html
:rolleyes:
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?
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
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?)
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.
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.
Actually, it just happened. You have seven minutes to evacuate...
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
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
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.
Perhaps Slashdot should learn from Sun's mistakes.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
# cd
# ln -s
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.
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.
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
My guess is that the reporter screwed up the description. I doubt Sun is stupid enough to claim that Linux and Windows don't have multithreading. It sounded more like they want to design a new processor designed to do multithreading, kind of a super version of the Intel hyperthreading but (maybe) with dozens of threads instead of 2, and that they also think the OS will have to be redesigned to take advantage of this new design processor.
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!"
In 2002, everyone lost sales, except for Dell's dekstops. Sun lost fewer sales than IBM and HP and everyone else in the industry, so it picked up marketshare, a critical yardstick of competitive performance in down markets. So, while Sun is fuxxored, it is less fuxxored than IBM, HP, SGI, Unisys, etc.
The piece was a hatchetjob that displayed very little deep understanding of the IT market.
SoupIsGood Food
I find this discussion and article interesting as Sun has never been the high performance leader, even in their own machine class. When it comes to RISC, Sun's SPARC line and decendents has always been slower than the competition. DEC's alpha, IBM's PowerPC, HP's PA-RISC all were always ahead.
What Sun provided was a platform on which more software was available sooner than any other platform. Then, it became more software than any other platform except Microsoft. I am sure this is the origin of the pre-occupation with Microsoft. Yet, while Sun was regularly able to pummel its better performing competitors with its wider and earlier software availability, it just can not rival Microsoft in the breadth and timing of software available. Note that I am not refering just to the software produced by the system manufacturers. In fact, if that were the sole measure, then HP and IBM would have given Sun a much greater challenge. Sun's key to success was getting ISVs to use their platform as their native development platform, ensuring it was the first platform everyone released on. All the others were ports, and thus were released months later. This was a huge edge for Sun that was terribly difficult for competitors to remedy. Simply building faster, "better" hardware would not lure ISVs to shift their development platform to another hardware vendor's product.
But, Micrsoft is far ahead of Sun in exactly those things that allowed Sun to beat its competition. I don't see Sun ever being able to succeed using that strategy, and they sure don't seem to be interested in any other. Though, with the other RISC platforms dropping like flies, being replaced by Itanium with all of its performance and acceptance problems, and sudden Sun's hardware looks like it may become king of that hill. Of course, no one is paying for that class of hardware any longer... if they do, they now go buy IBM's tREX and run piles of virtual Linux machines on it.
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.