Slashdot Mirror
Sun's President Dreams of a Linux Future
Sara Chan writes "The Economist has a story analyzing the recent Sun-Microsoft deal. What's especially interesting is the ending. Sun recently promoted Jonathan Schwartz to President and Chief Operating Officer, recognizing the need for radical change if the company is to survive. According to the story, Schwartz's dream is 'to sell deep-discount desktop computers at Wal-Mart, carrying Sun's office applications on top of a Linux operating system'!"
Just because it runs Linus doesn't mean the whole product's open source/free/whatever.
It seems like just yesterday (1996) I would have killed for a Sun workstation, but made due with linux. Now I have Linux boxen being used to replace Sun and SGI hardware for image analysis, and my Servers are running MacOS X.
--Tsiangkun
I'll be windows free for 10 years in June
That's not a dream. Showing the Open Source Desktop as a 'deep discount' alternative is de-grading to the community, as if we are a lower-quality brand. Gnome and KDE both strive to be the best, and should be marketted in this light too. I don't mean expensive, just quality (like Tescos has managed)
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
I think it will start off like this: Sun will give them a price. Compared to current Sun offerings, it will be very very cheap and about as low as Sun can go and actually make money. Fantastic. Everyone is happy. Two months later, however, Walmart does their famous "rollback" and no longer wants to sell a system at $699 but $588. Wal-mart doesn't want to absorb these costs. There are companies lined up around the block that are willing to sell to wal-mart. Therefore, Sun will absorb the cost. Will they make money in the beginning? Probably. But making money in the long term with Wal-mart is a very difficult thing indeed.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Strange how things change, it seems like Apple currently is gaining market share in Suns former core business, Unix workstations and earning lots of money. The idea of Sun is not bad at the first thought, but they always were better (until 2001) as the commodity hardware. What they need is to get their act together and make fast machines which run unix, everything else is lost effort. The problem is it is hard to beate the Wintel combination, Apple did it and their G5 is selling like hotcakes to Unix pros, Sun.... Sun bake a hot processor, put it in a cool box dump Solaris or Linux on it with a good desktop and sell it.... You have all components, except the processor! I dont think selling cheapos in Wallymart is really the key for Suns survival.
Things don't neccesarily look so rosy for MS either. Think about this, if Linux does totally marginalize Sun (like SCO is now) that means Linux has moved onto the big iron. How does MS move into a market where their OS is hardly supported on the machines required to do the job, especially when the OS is free? MS thinks their getting rid of one foe, only to find in it's place is something much more flexible, modern, and can't be outpriced.
Sun's business model needs to change. By building their own processors, systems, and operating software all at the same time, they are not going to do any of them very well and they will bleed out alot of cash. The only computer company to succeed at this sort of vertical integration - Commodore (they owned the company that made their processor) - succeeded because their product was aimed at one particular market and was extremely affordable. But that was the 80's. Today, there is just too much R&D that needs to go on... Sun is essentially making a profit on a single product when they sell a system while expending the cost of 3 products - a processor, a system, and an OS.
As an interning developer working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, I believe that Sun developing a linux-based strategy will be a great thing.
We use many Sun boxen, along with various flavors of Linux, and it would be tremendous to see more integration. Their work on linux-based Java has already been an enabling factor in our work and I believe that Sun has many good ideas (and good engineers working hard on it).
This annoucement gives me hope that we can continue in our relationship with Sun for future missions, while taking advantage of many of the best features of Linux.
To be fair I should mention we also use Windows and OS X to great effect as well, however good news for Sun is good news for us, especially considering the tremendous quantities of legacy software we have for Solaris!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
Yes, wouldn't that be awful for Microsoft.. They wouldn't be able to extend their monopoly onto the server to take over the complete enterprise.
They would have to subsist on their dominance on the desktop, and they would be stuck at only making $35 Billion per year and a growing cash horde of $50B.
But, that won't really be the case anyway. MS currently has a pretty small share of the enterprise server space. As Sun declines, that opens up a lot of opportunities in that arena. Yes, Linux will win a lot of that business, but MS will get a fair chunk - much more than they have now.
Remember when Compaq bought DEC? Fired all the really good people, let the really good technology (64-bit Alpha) wither and die (not due to lack of innovation, but complete lack of marketing and executive support), and became just another brand of PC-clone?
Then Fiorina gets involved, HP gets sucked in, and bam, another really good technology company gone, now just a PC-clone seller?
Yeah, I have some grudges. I'm not the world's hugest fan of Sun... but I see all the really innovative stuff they've done (even though I'm not a Java nut!) going away. And the computer world will be worse off without it.
The high-end is way more than $20k. I've spend well over $1M on a single, fully-configured Sun machine (one of the original E10Ks, with all 64 processores, lots of RAM, and a massive disk array). I've seen rooms full of those machines.
If you want a single, big UNIX monster, its still basically monster Sun, HP or IBM. Clustering is bringing Linux up there, but I don't see any 64 - 256 processor Linux boxes around (that I know about, anyway).
I don't know if that is due to the Intel platform (I know Linux is portable, but its mostly used on Intel in my experience) or due to locking in ther kernel. I do know the "old kernel" (I started with Linux 0.96c+, when the whole system was on 4 floppy disks, and we didn't even joke about a graphical interface, and Linux was no more popular than 386BSD) was not terribly scalable in a multi-processor setting. I don't know much about the scalability of the newer kernels, honestly.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
There was a time when saying you had a Sun meant you weren't just 1337, but respectable, a power user
I'd say that's already a lost battle. These days, "I've got a Sun" seems to elicit "Huh! That's kind of neat. Don't you spend all of your time trying to get seemingly trivial applications to compile, though?"
You're not much of a player anymore when you're trying to keep your head above water by selling commodity PCs.
Unless you're also the person who develops the most common implementation of the commodity OS that runs on the commodity PCs, and sells the "professional" version of the office software that all such PCs, including the ones made by other people, run. Then maybe you've got something. (And it doesn't hurt if this position means that you can, for example, get an actually good applet VM onto a majority of desktops, thus making your other products stronger.)
I don't know, but I think Sun wants the spot that Lindows covets and Redhat could have had (if they hadn't abandoned the consumer market).
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Sun has started as a workstation company, so even if they have been very successfull in big accounts, they know that that is not enough to survive.
I think, the Opteron boxes are an good move to get more share in the low end server market.
The interesting part is the way they want so sell their software: from the cooperation with AOL on Netscapes server products (Iplanet) to the current Jave Enterprise System, they still seem to believe in selling software as a commercial, closed source product. Even if they they to license it on a yearly base (and give customers real value, different from Microsoft, which software assurance program mostly anoys customers), they still keep the development process in house.
Even their try to sell Linux for desktops, JDS, is something you have to pay per employee or per seat, although it's mostly based on open source software like mozilla, evolution and gnome.
I don't think that this is doomed from the beginning. They may be successfull, if they can convince customers, that it's not just the software they pay for, but also support, service and updates. This could work, both for companies used to a "classic" way of buying software once and paying extra for support and for companies disappointed by using "unsupported" open source.
But this is the software strategy, which is mostly independant from their formerly very successfull hardware business. And software was only a small part of their business up to now. The hardware part is much bigger (and responsible for most of the service revenue). Even if they have cheap x86 (both Intel and AMD) boxes now, UltraSPARC is still their choice for the big servers, and UltraSPARC is lagging behind more and more in terms of performance, so that even much better RAS features (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) make it hard to sell those boxes and reason a hefty price tag.
So, even after almost three years with losses, Sun still heads interesting times. :-)
Maybe this is an obvious rant, please someone answer my question about the rumour below...
The days of Sun as a leading Unix server vendor are over and have been for a while now. They appear to be shifting to a software company and a reseller of cloned servers (Opteron & x86). They will still sell SPARC based servers for years to come, but it will be continual decline with a complete stop within 4-5 years. IBM and their Power5 based pSeries boxen will eat them for breakfast, Sun's answer is same old 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC from over a year ago, now you get double the density, lower overall throughput. Don't get me wrong, the technology works, it's just not as fast and robust as the IBM pSeries.
I think they're close to calling it quits with the SPARC. They've cut their R&D by 1/2 billion dollars and a lot of speculation is that the UltraSPARC 5 team got their walking orders as part the just announced 3300 person layoff.
Anyone care to confirm or deny this rumour? If this is true I expect that the US-5 will probably be the last gen SPARC CPU in about 18-24 months.
Sun has been a great company to deal with, and I will miss them for that. Their server technology just hasn't kept up with the low end commodity stuff where price/performance rules. And on the high end they get their asses kicked by IBM.
And now their doing a sideways tango with MS, I'm fearful for their chances.
I know, it's a stretch, but what about this this scenario: Sun merges all Solaris code into the linux code and the GNU/etc tools that are used with it. Then they roll out a new breed of UltraSPARC processors, and contribute code to GNU/etc/Linux so that it interfaces very efficiently with the new processors. Suddenly, the best way to get Linux is to get it on Sun's expensive-ass hardware. Many people stick with their x86 machines at first, but soon when it comes time to upgrade hardware, Linux on Sun looks more tempting than ever.
Yeah, I know, ain't gonna happen... but I guy can dream, right?
Funny, isn't Sun essentially doing with JDS what everyone's condemned in Microsoft for so long? Instead of offering JDS as an application suite, which is basically what it is, they've packaged it as an entire OS distribution, from the kernel up. What happened to the Java message of "write once, run anywhere"? Sounds to me like Sun's Java Desktop System will only run on Sun's flavor of the OS. There's already no doubt that's the only way they're going to support it.
Furthermore, they seem to want to "embrace and extend" (remember that one?) the Gnome desktop by re-writing large parts of it in Java (not yet in the current release, but stay tuned). I wonder how long it'll be before file format incompatibilities start to creep in.
Every vendor wants their lock-in, and to a large extent I think *that* is the reason behind corporate interest in GNU/Linux on the desktop. If I'm considering migrating off of Microsoft's desktop after having been in their stranglehold for so long, I'll be damned if I want to expose myself to the same situation with a different vendor.
Best of luck Sun, but I think a better play would have been to certify your applications to work with several of the major distros that are already out there. Customers are wising up to the dangers of the single-vendor OS and applications stack.
Loading...
The problem is that freedom is an end in itself, not freedom from MS, but just plain ole freedom. By the way Sun acts with their OS, and Java, it doesn't seem like they want freedom or want to be accountable to it. Rather they want a forced market share.
It's almost as if like MS and Sun have decided to share the pie, but make sure they get to keep the biggest pieces by shooting the cook. That way no newcommers get a piece of pie too, and so they won't half to compete (accept against each other) to keep the biggest shares.
I'd always envisaged Sun as a company with a rock solid quality OS, and faultless hardware for mission critical apps with top-notch support.
And then they have to go the Walmart route with a cheap box.
That's almost like Ferrari deciding that it's sick of making luxury cars, and opting to make bicycles instead.
There's a place for cheap linux boxes for those who want their internet/mail/office... but for Sun to do it???
This is going to take some getting used to....
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
SUN should have pushed harder on MS regarding JAVA.
.NET
First and foremost, they should have made MS get rid of their broken JVM completly (if you install the latest service pack on a machine without the JVM, you get the JVM. No service pack currently downloadable should contain any contents of the MS JVM.
In fact, SUN should have (if it was possible) told MS that they had to distribute the SUN Java VM.
Its like when AOL and MS made up for the Netscape debacle.
Not only did MS only have to pay a piddling little fine but AOLTW actually sggreed to use crappy MS technology (like Windows Media Player and Intercrap Exploder). The settlement with MS over the Netscape issue actually BENIFITED MS.
Same with the sub settlment.
All they have to do is pay a little fine and remove their VM from new pressings of windows. They dont have to remove it from service packs or anything else. MS benifits because the cluless idiots (banks for example) who coded JAVA to its broken VM have no reason to change plus the true JAVA (i.e. the sun official standard) doesnt get any further forward.
This can only benifit Microsofts new JAVA killer in the form of
First off, neither Lindows nor Linux has proven that there's any money whatsoever in "selling" Linux. None. Neither one has made a dime from it, contrary to what non-business people think that Redhat did with their accounting games.
Secondly, shifting a company from super high end to low end, has not, to my knowledge, ever worked. You might as well throw away the company and start over, since there is very little value transferrable between these two types of company. Name? Nobody who's not in IT has ever heard of Sun. Marketing? They have no idea how to market to consumers. Manufacturing? They don't know how to make cheap, shitty products. This guy's throwing away what's called their company's "core competencies", looking for a quick buck. It will be a monumental failure. That's been foreshadowed with each of Sun's forays into the consumer market, and any other business that has tried to make a shift this dramatic. Just because they're both computer companies doesn't mean shit. You simply can't decide that your company is going to make a 180 degree change in services, products, marketing, etc. and expect it to survive, unless you have enough cash to, once again, create an entirely new company.
not a Sun PC.
Deep-discount computers S U C K. They *must* know this
They do. Profit margins on deep discount PC's were so small that Sun was not able to provide the level of customer support that they would like to provide. That's why customer support is being handled by a third party. However, it does act as another front of attack. Previously Microsoft only had to keep pushing the price/performance upwards to compete against workstations and servers. Now, they (or the PC makers) are sandwiched between high-end servers, thin client systems, and now deep discount PC's. Every PC sold is one less Microsoft Windows Tax paid.
1. Find its fonts without having to edit the XF86Config file 189 times and install some half-working font server for the other three fonts.
That's funny, it all happened automatically here.
2. Upgrade Gnome and KDE applications without having to install yet ANOTHER version of glibc.
WTF are you talking about? New versions of glibc hardly ever come out, and something as high-level as KDE applications certainly don't need glibc updates (KDE applications sit on top of the KDE libraries, the KDE libraries sit on top of the Qt toolkit, the Qt toolkit sits on top of glibc).
3. Have a file manager that isn't linked to every single library on the system, so that if one library is upgraded/replaced, it doesn't make the file manager useless.
Konqueror works just fine for me.
4. Make it so these problems can be fixed without changing distributions.
Let me guess, you used Joe's FooBar Linux 0.01 distro, complained about all the problems you were having, and then were shocked to have people tell you to use something established that catered to newbies like Mandrake, right?
Remember people, it's not insightful if the whole argument is based on fiction.
At that rate the 1.6 to 2B USD will be gone in just a few quarters. And I'm sorry Mr. Schwartz but selling cheap commodity hardware at razor thin margins will not help much. The only way that strategy will work is if Linux becomes the de facto standard and Sun distinguishes itself with its Sparc hardware. But that will take years and 2B doesn't seem like enough to bankroll it. Can Sun hold out long enough? Unix sales are collapsing fast. What are they going to do for money in the meantime? And will they break rank like SCO and try to preserve short term revenue at the cost of their long term viability?
I just can't help myself. Look at that handshake in the picture. McNealy looks like Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, cautious not to get any body parts too close to the mouth. Crikey!
the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic.
McCarthy Lives!
Sharing != Communism. Communism != Fascism. Communism == Democracy == Freedom.
Anyone who disagrees doesnt A) Understand Marx/Lennin/Trotsky and B) confuses propaganda with reality. The USSR stopped being Communist when it turned into a Dictatorship.
Eh, they'll be bought soon enough. I'd like to see Apple do it, they're the only ones that would truly benefit from buying Sun.
To late. Sun's main asset, a world-class enterprise sales force, has been hemmoraging for too many years.
The smart people have left, the customers know they're circling the drain, and they'd spend at least four years coming out with anything like the XServe or XServe RAID, or even re-creating what they once had with Cobalt.
Nothing to see here, folks. It's all over but the maintenance contracts.
Red Hat does, actually. Everything they write is GPL'd, and they do not include non-free software with their distribution (IIRC, last thing they did that was problematic was Netscape, and that's been gone for years). In fact, one could argue that the inclusion of non-free software in the apt repositories for Debian means that Red Hat / Fedora is actually MORE free than Debian. I don't think that's true, but it's something to consider.
I think Mandrake also GPLs everything, for that matter. SuSE recently GPL'd YaST, too, so actually, they might be totally free, too.
I hope that educates you.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
But he is smart, in the business sense.
No.
He's good at self promotion, but he has demonstrated precisely SQUAT as far as ability to manage engineers, or a sales force. He is as utterly unqualified for his current job as Ballmer, and by all rights his appointment should be the cause of a shareholder revolt, if anyone still gave a shit.
Apparently, MS's strategy is to start collecting patents and in a quick fashion. MS has only recently started building a decent R&D group which is finally obtaining some good patents (most of the ones prior to about 3 years ago were garbage, straight rip offs of others work, or from the companies that they bought ).
Now, MS is busy buying up whatever they can. Just a bit ago, they bought a number of patents from SGI. In addition, they are trying to pawn SCO into an IP fight with Linux when in reality the only fight that SCO stands a chance on is contractual.
I am guessing that MS has some deal with Ray Norda/Canopy Group to buy SCO iff SCO appears to be winning any agreement against Linux.
Even though I use and develop on KDE, it will seem odd if MS owns canopy group which owns 5% of the trolls.
But hey, this is all conjecture.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Just yesterday a coworker and myself were trying to figure out how many desktops Sun has had, or is proposing. I use the term "desktop" loosely.
g Glass
I came up with:
DPS
NeWS
OpenWindows
CDE
Gnome
JDS
Lookin
But since my friend was an ex-Sun employee who worked on NeWS, he came up with a few more that I never heard of.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
All versions of Oracle took days to install, and I found tuning information to be very difficult to find and comprehend via free or paid-for resources
Eh? I have just installed Oracle 10g on a Linux box. Took 3 hours from start to finish. Detailed documentation about how to do this was available on-line at Oracle.
9i and 10g were able to complete the tests, but at half the speed of MS or PG. Perhaps if we'd hired a consultant they'd have been able to get better numbers, but no one was willing to pay to find out when we had two perfectly good platforms which cost much less.
Bizarre. After the 3-hour install, Oracle was up and running and giving at least a five-fold performance boost over Postgresql, with no fiddling or tuning.
MySQL is the Open source DB of choice for most for a reason. try it.
... and this is where the difference between a real database and some crufty piece of shit like ms-sql or ms-access comes in. A real DB will run much more effectivly on larger hardware that a crufty piece of shit. in other words: the performance increase once you get onto higher end machines is not equal, mySQL, postgreSQL and especially DB2 and Oracle experience massive gains in performance when compared to any MS database.
.... a large part of that is the platform it runs on IMHO.
Secondly although you can install Oracle on intel hardware it was not (and shouldnt be) desiegned for intel hardware
Not to be an ass (I am no DBA) but I have seen very large gains 15-20% in overall speed when PG or My are properly tweaked by a DBA with experience. I have never seen someone get comparable performance from MsSQL
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
The top execs at Sun are either cashing out or leaving. Bill Joy, the most senior engineer, author of 'vi' and all the rest left last year. Their senior Java promotor took off after the MS agreement.
My guess is that the senior execs that are left will now be cashing out using the 2Billion payment from MS.
Sun will be maintained as an off-the-shelf MS corporate hull. The next phase of the MS attack will probably be in the form of a pollution of Linux code base via Sun. Remember that Sun is the only company which is now dependent on both SCO and Microsoft.
Be very, very careful.
Sun boxes at Wally World? Step away from the crack pipe now, Mr McNearly, and put the gun down!