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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'!"
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");
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.
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
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. :-)
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?
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.
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