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Sun Posts Increasing Loss
Chromodromic writes "Sun Microsystems posted an increasing loss at a time when many tech firms are beginning to report stable or increasing earnings and stocks are looking up. According to the Wall Street Journal, it looks like Sun, the formidable peddlers of Solaris, Java, and UltraSPARC Fire servers are facing competition from measly ol' Dell and Intel. Even Scott McNealy has been reported to concede in a May 2002 meeting with top execs that Sun has to change, including building up trust with customers that have been put off by McNealy's sometimes controversial personality and Sun's reputed internal disarray which according to Merrill Lynch is indicating that Sun requires a makeover. The Merrill Lynch report was, in fact, particularly scathing and has raised a few Wall Street eyebrows."
Is to fire the lazy ass American workers and outsource fine systems like Solaris and Java to India.
Oh, wait...
...this joke is dying.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Full disclosure: I really dislike SUNW as a company. I think their products are weak and overpriced, and I think
Java is actually the worst thing to happen to computing, evar. McNealy is a whiney dork in my book, always playing 2nd
fiddle to Bill, Steve and Larry. It's pathetic what he drones on about, really. But enough praise...
I think if SUNW were to close shop tomorrow, it would serve to re-enforce the fact that Microsoft is an monopoly; SUNW
just becomes the next victim. So in death, SUNW can serve a purpose.
If Sun collapses, they would have to rename the company to... Black Hole!
(doges rotten tomatoes)
They should also replace their puny vi implementation with a more modern and useable vim : it is not normal, in 2003 to have vi INSERTING funky characters when the user tries to use the VT keyboard arrows while editing text.
(Adding Emacs should also prevent most users to do so)
Well, the above is symptomatic : the Sun platform is a Rolls : very solid but ergonomically showing its age.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
What are these people smoking?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Many people have complained about the experience of using Solaris from the desktop environment to the compiler (originally none) to the editor. In each case you've chosen to fix the problem by bundling the best-of-breed open source option thereby increasing compatibility while decreasing cost. It's time to go all the way.
The Debian project has been working on abstracting the GNU/ from the Linux by porting the distribution to other kernels. It's time for the Solaris kernel to toss off its ugly Unix wrappings and become the apex of the open source world: GNU/Solaris. With one exception: it shouldn't be free.
PC hardware is largely commodity junk and the Linux kernel still has trouble scaling to massive architectures. Consider this scenario: a small company uses PCs running Linux; as the company grows, so does its server requirements, but all its applications are running on GNU/Linux. This is where Sun steps in: all their applications can be easily, even seamlessly, ported to massive SPARC servers running GNU/Solaris. Both Sun and the open source community concentrate on their strengths, and the customers have an upgrade path: everybody wins!
Or you could stick with your administrator-hostile Unix distribution and your overpriced workstations until Bill and Linus fight over who gets to eat your sweetbread. It's all up to you.