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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
-- Henrik Ibsen
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.).
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
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).
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
when you're the dot in "dot com". Dot coms crash, you crash.
-no broken link
-- 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?)
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.
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.
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.