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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."
I don't know a thing about Solars (other than it doesn't support all my hardware), however I used to do a considerable amount of Java programming. I didn't mind Java, but some of the bugs in it just never seem to get fixed.
I think the reason some believe Sun in on SCO's side is because they used some pretty harsh language towards IBM regarding the licensing issues. Check out the Newsforge history, and see for yourself.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
Sun has been through some tough times recently, but it's about to come back, all guns blazing and kicking ass on all fronts.
I do NOT understand?? Why is this being discussed here?? To deliberately bash SUN?? Why is a company's financial position being discussed?? Has Slashdot analysed other company's financial reports..the ONLY company I see being pulled into such discussions OVER and OVER again is SUN!!! What is this morbid obsession?? Give them a chance, at least...this is sick and I am VERY disappointed...
There are two things that stick out in my mind, 1) the SCO affair and 2) the lack of a clear position on Linux. Sun seems to flip flop between love and hate with Linux.
Personally, I like Sun for their hardware and service. Solaris is not the selling point for me. Mind you I only have a dozen 4-way Suns under my wing, things might differ if I had 64-way E10000s to take care of. I think Sun *must* play the Linux game at this point, critical mass has been reached and the game is now Linux for low and mid range systems. The high end market is a different beast and Sun can either stick with Solaris or go with virtualization like IBM is doing.
To get to the point, the longer they fight change, the harder it's going to be to for Sun to realign themselves later on. Sun's advantage is it's hardware and service, they still have that edge. They need to concede the Solaris / Linux OS war and focus on their strengths. As for Sun aligning itself with MS, it'll never happen. MS wants to eat Sun's lunch very badly and Sun knows it all too well.
I like Sun, the company, they've done good things. They're in a directional void right now and facing some painful market changes that they simply need to embrace, not fight. It's gonna suck for them in the short term, but they'll be a stronger company for it in the long term.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Worse. At the higher-mid end arena Sun is behind Fujitsu PrimePOWER. Sun's never quite made it to the real high end.
Fujitsu PrimePOWER machines run Solaris. And they run significantly faster. Go look at spec.org. Go check out the CPU designs - if you want a SPARC processor that does > 1GHz and has out-of-order execution you don't go Sun, you go Fujitsu. They also have instruction retry done in hardware.
At the low end? There's Dell. And if AMD doesn't die there'll be Opteron servers (and these + Linux look very dangerous to Sun - esp since IBM's selling Opteron servers too...).
For alternative high ends - try IBM. Or if your problem can be split up - try lots of commodity boxes.