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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."
My university's Laboratory for Computer Science did a test between a Sun machine and a IBM compatable running linux in order to see if they could justify the cost of buying new Sun machines like they always have. IIRC the Sun machine cost five times more and performed three times worse than the IBM.
This was on running code from the profs (so research code), which is mainly what the machines would be used for.
but not his outspokenness.
One, they started with Unix because it was open. Among the unix licensees the scene has the bazaar atmosphere. They should have jumped on Linux.
Also they are a hardware company and not all their hardware is great anymore. The Ultra 10's seem to crash like flies (this mixed metaphor is anecdotal and maybe you think different).
Does Java make them money?
-pyrrho
2 1337 4 u!
Some people think that Sun does have a future as a hardware manufacturer, but I think I will have to agree with the article, they can't win the fight against being squeezed out of the market by cheap Intel/AMD servers running Linux (or Windows..).
They really have to decide where they are going, and find a new way to earn money. I think Java is their best bet. I HOPE they will do something like IBM, and jump on the Linux bandwagon as the main platform for Java. Still, finding a steady and large revenue stream from that could be difficult. I suspect they get some from Websphere and the other one (forget what its called), and maybe some from selling courses in Java, but that can't be enough. If they started charging money for using Java I think they would discover that their customer loyalty would evaporate pretty quickly.
I suspect some people here on Slashdot will crow about the problems Sun is going through, but consider that Sun has actually been good for the Open Source world. If it wasn't for the fact that it is a cheap Java platform, Linux would not be as widespread as it is in the business world. Also, they gave us Open Office, and participates and even sponsors a number of Open Source projects. Ant, GNOME, Tomcat, GNUlpr, Open Office... Sure, most projects are Java related, but that is understandable and it is still more than most of the big companies have given us.
Well, if they die, it will be interesting to see what happens with Java. Perhaps they will Open Source it completely, if not out of the goodness of their hearts, then at least as a poison pill against Microsoft...
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
From one minute, to the next, what is up with Sun. Some questions for Scott:
1) Does Sun support x86 for Solaris?
2) Does Sun support Linux on Sparc?
3) Is Linux good, or bad?
4) Why can't you run multple Linux VMs on a single Solaris O/S?
Simple stuff. Basic stuff. But it changes with the hour of the day and the latest "Marketing Announcement" at Sun. Why would I work with Sun as a reseller of anything if I don't know from minute to minute what they want me to pitch?
Sun provides many things that are *good* - such as Java, and Open Office. It just really, truly blows to see this power blown in such an incredible display of marketing ineptitude...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Speaking about Java - just admit that Java has failed. Java in general and EJB specifically are not scalable down, in terms of memory usage, process startup and small project development time. That is bad for really distributed applications. Admit also that a load-balanced cluster of small and mid end servers is cheaper and faster for 80% (if not 99%) of web (and many corporate) applications. In such situations the scalability up is also not really important. So, swtch to Python, Sun. And again, if you find that Python lacks some EJB (but not Java! - Python is practically perfect as a language) features - port them to Python, help Zope or 4Thought or Twisted projects.
In both cases switch your business model to consulting, customized solutions, training - learn from the success of IBM.
Or die.
"I shall explain this by waving my hands about in an appropriate manner." -- Cambridge University Math Dept.
Like IBM and HP, Sun's high-end systems are still getting poor sales - all big projects are having trouble getting funding in the current climate. Sun haven't helped themselves by being late with new products - UltraSPARC IIIi was quite late and UltraSPARC IV still isn't out yet (though coming soon).
Interestingly, a high-light of the quarter was Sun's sales of low-end servers - their 1-2 way UltraSPARC systems as well as their low-end x86 systems.
My company is currently testing their database migration to a SUN environment. In this process we spec'd out a comparable lintel and wintel comparison. We received price quotes from multiple vendors, but SUN was the one who delivered a better bang for the buck.
You can look at the list price of the equipment online and it looks way more expensive, but once you talk to a sales rep, the discounts start rolling in. And claim whatever you want, they did the same thing 3 years ago and 6 years ago. This is not due to their stock price, fear of Redmond, or whatever you want to blame this on.
Oh, one more thing, the "Merrill" guy, he has never had much good to say about Sun. For every article where he kind-of gives Sun good favor, he will follow it with one that is more damning.
The exact same 1 CPU Dell configuration as a rack mounted server (yes, the PE1750) ... $1,698
Still cheaper than Sun's crap, or? In fact, even cheaper than the desktop configuration.
If you had a reading comprehension above that of a 5 year old you might have been clued into the fact that they are comparing their servers to the Dell poweredge servers. Dell's 1750 server is cheaper than the Sun 60x, but the Sun65x is just several hundred off. I would bet that after corporate discounts the price diff would neg. and if Sun's servers perform better...). I can't stand Slashdot idiots making invalid comparisons.
Ah, a jolly good flame war. Count me in.
So lemme see. You can't even notice that the PE 1750 is even cheaper, and spew stuff like "If takes a lot more engineering(and money) to make a powerful server in a 1U form factor." Well, gee, Dell's price list says the exact opposite.
Or let's talk basic comprehension of numbers and economics. "is just several hundreds off". Well, guess what? The V60x is exactly $752 more expensive, or a whole 44.3% more expensive than the Dell. (752 * 100 / 1698, for the maths impaired.)
The v65x is even more expensive. It's $2,550 for the smallest config. So $852, or 50.2% more expensive than the Dell.
So you're advocating... what? Paying 50% extra for the _exact_ same machine, just to have Sun's logo on it? Lemming.
As for "if Sun's servers perform better...", that's a huge "if". I'd really like to see some benchmarks first. No, seriously. They're can use exactly the same CPU, motherboard and memory as any other Intel server manufacturer can use. So if you want me to believe that just a bit of marketing hocus pocus will make it run faster, you better show some numbers that prove that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
> If takes a lot more engineering(and money) to make a powerful server in a 1U form factor
Where did you get that idea? 1U form factor servers are about the same price these days. Well, perhaps not from Sun, but in the commodity Intel market.. (dell)
Sure you can link together a bunch of cheap PC's, but now you've just shifted the problem that was already solved with a software solution. Using grids is great for processes that can really be batched and distributed, but somethings like high availability is easier with a big IBM or SUN box. Plus, if millions of dollars are flowing through the database per hour, I wouldn't put it on Linux until the hardware matures a bit more. When you consider switched network specification and motherboards won't be selling in retail for atleast nother 10-15 yrs, your only option is to go to NEC, HP and IBM. It's not cheap either. If you look at the TPC results on windows, they are all using their own cell controllers to group CPU's into cells. They basically took all their existing mainframe/Unix designs and modified it to work with x86 CPU's.
Pretty wierd attitude if true, when Sun was founded Microsoft was a little itty bitty software house that made most of its money from selling applications software for the Mac. The MSDOS business was about as important as the BIOS industry is today - cash cow with little growth.
The hardware industry has always been subject to the iron law that there is no high end. To find out why read 'the innovator's dilema'. It is much easier to move upmarket than downmarket. Dell know how to build large numbers of machines with tiny margins. It is not a huge step to move from there to building large machines with lots of processors.
The talk about high bandwidth, R&D etc is pretty specious. If Dell wanted to get into the real high end they could buy the same knowledge and expertise for a pitance from SGI which trod the same path Sun is now on five to ten years earlier.
Before very long Sun won't be in the workstation and low cost server market at all. They will continue to make big iron for a while but they will always be under attack from PC makers moving upmarket.
The basic problem that Sun faces is that Intel's annual R&D budget is larger than Sun's market cap. Intel will always have access to a better fab process, better design technology, more people.
Sun's original breakthrough came because it moved to RISC at exactly the right time. At the time CPU designs were usually created by small teams of four or five lead designers and a small number of assistants. The big advantage of RISC was that you optimized the CPU design to the compiler rather than the assembly coder. RISC designs started without any legacy to support, that meant that you could complete your design faster and get to market with a cuting edge fab process a year before CISC rivals.
That advantage is long gone. At this point there is no real difference between designing the next generation SPARC and designing the next generation Pentium. Both are now decades old architectures with mountains of legacy code to support.
Even Intel finds it difficult to keep up with the development of the Pentium. Their problems with Merced are largely due to the fact that the Pentium team have a big enough resouce advantage to overcome their legacy architectural constraints.
Sun is simply playing a poker game that is too rich for its purse.
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