Slashdot Mirror
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."
As many have noted, Sun have never formed a coherent strategy about linux. Their statements re. linux seem to be a mix of hostility, skepticism and euphoria. Also, they have a finger in every pie without a clear vision of where they want to be in a market of ups and downs. And lately they have shown that they are not above cheap marketing gimmicks either -- witness the branding of Mad Hatter as the "Java desktop system" (its actually just another linux distro.)
But I'm afraid they'll make up with Microsoft and not us.
Much as they have exhibited a multiple-personality disorder where we are concerned, I'll not forget the good they've done us.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
but I do agree SUN is doomed.
I've been talking to a senior financial trader early this year, he said SUN's stock price is sky-rocketed to a point that they have to produce at $0 cost and sells for ten years to make up for the hyped value. Which is, of course, almost impossible.
Until recently I do believe SUN has already stuck one foot into its doom. As I speak we've already ruled out Solaris in several enterprise projects in favour of Linux. The cost of ownership is one factor, and the full-range maintenance supports from IBM, HP and Oracle is indeed a killer.
It's true that(don't flame) Linux has much to catch up with Solaris in enterprise deployment, but the market demand for Linux will only cause Linux to catch up fast and thus SUN's products will soon lose their market competitiveness very soon.
Today, they are the same company they were 6 years ago. With the same operating system, the same hardware, but without the cool people and in fact without much at all that is still cool. The fact that they haven't changed with the times is exactly the problem.
In order for Sun to fix itself, it needs:
- A super cool, fast and cheap workstation. We are talking a cheap 4-way (or 8-way) Opteron with a 3D display or something similar. It has to be the best bang-for-the-buck on the market with features and "cool factor" that no-one else has. McNeally should walk across the street from the Cupertino campus and ask Jobs how to make this happen.
- To re-build their reputation as the price/performance leader. This is what kept their financial engines running strong through the 90s and they need to do it again. Even if they have to sell at cost in order to build the economy of scale, they MUST do this and do it NOW. They should shift to AMD processors in a huge way until their multi-core ultrasparcs hit, they should do whatever is neccessary. Period.
- They need to kiss and make-up with IBM. IBM can make a good partner for Sun. But Sun has alienated IBM and now IBM sees them as a pesky competitor instead of a competitive partner as Sun needs them to.
- They need a new center of gravity. Java was a perfect center-of-gravity for a long time. But Java is boring now. Nobody cares anymore... Sun has hundreds, if not thousands, of beautiful research projects that are sexy and cool... These generally stay research, which is unfortunate. They need to go harvest a couple of these and revv up their PR engines..
The greatest mistake that Sun can make right now is to assume that they will "pull out" of their death-spiral by making Java Desktops and waiting for the next generation of ultra-sparcs to hit. That is exactly how they can guarantee their own death. To live, they must kill their own business and allow the new, innovate stuff that they have in their labs to rise like a pheonix from the ashes of what was killed.The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
But let's see if it's at least true.
Let's take the cheapest v60x.
Sun: 1 Xeon CPU 2.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 36 GB SCSI HDD (10K RPM), gigabit ethernet... $2,450
Dell: _exact_ same configuration, without an OS (since I'm gonna install Linux on it too), no network switch included... $1,746
No seriously, check out the Dell PowerEdge 1600SC and set it to 2.8 GHz, "512MB DDR SDRAM,1x512 ", No OS and None in the " Dell PowerConnect Network Switches" category.
Whoops, so Sun is full of s**t again. The Dell is, in fact, one helluva lot cheaper than Sun's bulls**t.
Let's try a dual CPU, then?
Sun: 2 Xeon CPU 2.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 36 GB SCSI HDD (10K RPM), gigabit ethernet... $3,395
Dell: we'll take the same as Dell server as above, and bring it on par with the Sun: second 2.8 GHz Xeon, and "1.0GB DDR SDRAM,2x512"... $2,844
Whoops, again, the Dell is actually cheaper. Reality is quite different from Sun's marketing bulls**t, isn't it?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
See: 'Suns Changing Horizon'
g =s t_rn
http://news.com.com/2009-7339_3-5087245.html?ta
"But even in the face of this barrage, industry veterans say the company is hardly on the verge of collapse."
"Industry veterans say although Sun has warned of a hefty loss and analysts are calling for drastic changes, the company has viable plans for the future."
Replacing all those buffer-overflow errors with errors caused by incorrect amounts of whitespace is sure to be the root of commercial recovery....
Not to excuse Sun's business behavior, but I've done side-by-side comparisons of database jobs on Sun and WinTel gear (with the Window box clocked twice as fast), and the Sun server beat it by a factor of two.
When it came to raw CPU performance, Intel-based systems rocked (though the margin is closing with the higher speed UltraSparc III's). Sun's also done a lot on the pricing side (take a look at the SunFire V240).
Bottom line: I still deploy plenty of Sun servers. And WinTel boxes. And LinTel boxes.
I'm sure Sun can turn themselves around (they make _really_ nice hardware, for example) but it will take a return to core competency.
I agree with Merrill Lynch's assessment of Sun:
I think the ML analyst has it. In an article I read a while back, McNealy said that Dell wasn't a competitor because they didn't sell a complete solution and only sold systems. He said Dell had a terrific parts-distribution business. Unfortunately, he's missed that Dell's distribution is a major driver of their business, and a key reason Dell is successful today (I'd rate Dell hardware at medium-to-high, for example.)