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Merrill Lynch Rips Sun
cosjef writes "In an open letter to Sun, an analyst for Merrill Lynch tells Sun to change or risk adding itself to the junkyard of formerly-great technology companies like DEC or Data General. The letter even recommends taking the helm away from McNealy, whose 'brash and contrarian personality have been synonymous with the company's image and success. Unfortunately, the act is getting old.' Sun's mistakes are well documented, but the biggest one is believing that what made them successful in the past would make them successful in the future."
Unfortunately, many companies then made advertising and PR their primary products, slashing R&D because they thought they'd had their budget strategies wrong all along. Sun was king of this, apparently thinking a strong brand was what sold systems, not leading edge technology. Engineering went into the toilet, and now while Sun's still good at a few things, all but their most insanely-priced hardware is nothing better than what you get with off-the-shelf commodity components.
Today, people are researching to upgrade and evolve their server networks, not just grabbing the first implementation they think they understand. And that means it takes a lot more than McNealy's I-wanna-be-Steve-Jobs song and dance to sell product.
Sun will be fine. After the exit of the two companies mentioned in the story, they are the 64 bit and high end market provider now.
//Netmar uses sun machines. www.netmar.com
Seriously. If you want to spend $5000, $8000, or even $75,000 on a computer, you can go to Dell. But, if you're looking to drop $1.3 million on a computer, you go to Sun.
For anyone that has used sun hardware, we know. It really can't be beat. The stuff is fast, scalable, and bulletproof. Sun OS is about as stable as they come.
~Will
sig?
I've been an avid investor and it is my experience that the financial firms such as MerrylLynch, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and others have their own biased stance. They are either flogging a company so that a competitor will rise in value or just are simply wrong. Furthermore, I think you're describing Merryl Lynch's business model here. Marketing is how financial industry make money, hell they can sell you paper for your dollars, they gotta be doing a great job of marketing. Who's Wall Street to talk about substance? The whole financial industry is operating on hot air. Oh wait, hot air actually has some value.
I mean... let' run through some arguments here:
1) if they are so good at analyzing the market and which company will do good / do bad, why arn't they sitting around with billions, but instead slaves away at financial institutions?
2) how many analysts spoke out at the beginning of the dot com bubble insightfully? (i.e. "this won't last?") IIRC everyone, yes including the analysts, were basically like "hey everybody what a wonderful opportunity! buy buy buy!"
3) AFAIK analyst predictions on stock / company performance has never been any more accurate than random guesses or predictions from a layman (within error tolerance) - I believe the reference was fool.com;
so, can anybody GIVE me a reason why market analysts should be trusted for their opinions? Besides that they went through a couple years of economy schoool (which, according to my acquaintance studying economy, is mostly like astrology)?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Both SGI and Sun were killed (past tense) by commodity hardware that was "good enough" to take away their sales even before they stopped innovating. In SGI's case, they panicked believing Itanium would come out in 1997 and kill them. They tried to switch to commodity hardware but couldn't stomach it and the dithering ate away at them. Itanium still sucks to this day (but MIPS could never break 1Ghz...).
.com boom of 2000. Now they're getting killed by Dells at the low end and grids at the high end. They have a huge number of employees because the company is feeding off historical service contracts (the same thing that's keeping SGI on life support). Sun needs to shrink, simplify, and focus or they'll be dead in 10 years also.
Sun fell down on the workstation side a long time ago, but their servers were hot thru the
Disclaimer: I am not a Sun employee and own no stocks but I do contracting work for them and like the company.
;) Sparc will probably marginalize in the long run (not in the next two three years though).
Saying that Sun is focused on marketing more than technology is rediculous to anyone who knows the company from inside. Sun makes computers in the high end that few can compete with. Up to 4 CPU's go with Intel+Linux but when we go over to 8 or 16 cpu's then both cost and performance are on Sun's side.
However Linux+Intel/AMD/PPC(IBM) are getting much better and cheaper and at a point I guess Sun won't be able to compete on the hardware side, and like SGI before it will have to make a switch and let go of the large margines etc...
I feel that Sun can survive that switch, its one of the best managed companies I worked with, thats a true live demonstration of how their own technology can be used to make the employees life easier.
A simplified view would look at Sun's declining server sales and say thats it... However Sun is huge and makes zillions of other things:
1. CPU's and special hardware - Sun ray is actually selling well and limited only by the lack of marketing drive to sell it. It works with Linux also so it allows cheaper deployment.
2. Sun owns Cobalt that make great Linux boxes.
3. Sun has a huge software stack including Solaris (that has quite a few features still missing from Windows/Linux) and star office. This allows Sun to offer an almost full hardware+software stack (including the application server) with the only thing missing being a database server. Only few companies can seriously compete in this level.
4. Sun has several divisions that do outsourcing work for many global companies including cellular operators etc...
Sun has many revenue streams many of which won't dry up even if the whole world left Sparc+Solaris and moved to Linux+Intel.
The reasons for Suns decline are:
1. Moving to Linux+Intel - yes it has a serious effect on the company and changes need to be made.
2. Dot com failure - Suns biggest clients were the dot coms and when they bombed Sun is trying to move into traditional industries. This takes time.
The Sun will rise again although I doubt the Sparc will be there
I have no doubt that these guys can pull it off though.
Solaris is critical to why users like Sun. Being late to Linux is unforgivable both because Linux is a kissing cousin to Unix and because Linux is a disruptive threat to Microsoft.
Sun needs to convince users that Linux is a subset of Solaris and push two messages: (1) if you're doing Linux, go to the Unix expert, and (2) use Linux on the edge, but when you need mission-critical capability it's time to graduate to Solaris.
That's incredible. Since when should a technology company be worried about disrupting a competitor? Nuts. Sun should make all the money it can and if it does so by taking share from a competitor's inferior offerings, that's great. Merrill Lynch is attempting to halt technological progress in order to protect it's worthless Microsoft holdings. This is ass backward, they should be looking out for their investors by urging them to sell Microsoft.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
- To benefit the analyst (bonuses etc.)
- To benefit the bank or banking clients (see point 1)
- Publicity
The good of the standard investor or the company being invested in doesn't even come into it. The fact he's made this an open letter means he needs Sun's stock to move for one reason or another.But my experience with Merrill Lynch and my brother's experience likewise is that they are without integrity. Therefore, you cannot trust anything they say.
Just as an example, you read their advice to "convince Linux users that Linux is a subset of Solaris..."
Bud, that ain't going to happen. SCO is too busy with the exact same thing. And yes, it's great for their stock price, especially since a Microsoft-club investor is buying up as much stock as they can.
But SCO isn't healthy.
Of course, their other advice, to slash the workforce, is also in the same line: it is detrimental to the health of Sun. Let me explain what happens when you slash the work force.
First of all, all those employees who thought that they had reasonable job security, get depressed. Depression means more time wasted. It means decreased efficiency. That means more cuts, down the road. Eventually, it means you outsource everything, and end up as a shell (though maybe an IP shell like SCO, which generates lots of volatility, which might be good for Merrill Lynch).
Second of all, when you cut the workforce, employees get paranoid. That means that they start to decide that they don't have the authority to stick up (the nail that sticks up, getting hammered and all). So they don't try to innovate. In fact, they squelch innovation. They try to make it look like they're doing as good a job as anyone else, and aside from that avoid notice.
Worse than that, it sickens the company in another way: ...
Suppose you have n employees. The internal threats to a company are a function of the number of employees. A failure can happen with any one of the n employees. Or it can happen with any group of 2 employees. Or with 3 employees. All together, the probability of a failure occurring is
n + n*(n-1)/2 + n*(n-1)*(n-2)/6 +
Now, at the same time, employees don't like to see their company fail, so they do try to fix things. But their ability to fix things is a function of their authority. If their authority is not enough to fix it, then the fix won't happen, and the company takes a loss of some amount. So the same equation as above applies to the number of employees with authority: ...
a+a*(a-1)/2+a*(a-1)*(a-2)/6 +
Of course, a is less than n. So the health of a company is greater if a=n, or is as large as possible. But when you're making cuts, even employees who are nominally with authority act like they have no authority. So every single little cold, every single angry statement, every single office affair hurts the company and results in real damages.
So Sun, Don't Listen to Merrill Lynch. Unless you first exchange all your stock for all of theirs in a 100%-100% stock swap. It might not be a bad idea, at that. From the open letter, I'm sure Merrill's market analysts know how to build hardware and write software. And at that, I'd trust you guys with my assets a lot sooner than I'd trust them.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Sun puts all its energy into the Solaris scalability features, and ignores some pretty basic things that make the operating system have the flavor of a Victrola.
Let's just run through a few of the problems:
Sun has this attitude of "if it's not in the SVR4 codebase, then it doesn't go into the Solaris base install." This is just dumb. I realize that it is important to preserve compatibility for old shell scripts and utilities, and that Sun has taken some strides with Gnome and perl integration, but 95% of the new and interesting work in UNIX is taking place in the GPL and BSD spheres of influence, which Sun mostly ignores.
In many respects, Solaris has been at a standstill for the past 10 years.