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Should Sun Just Fold Now?
KE1LR writes "The Silicon Insider at ABCnews.com is taking the position that Sun Microsystems, creator of the SPARC architecutre and, oh yeah, Java, should just give up and close shop instead of continuing to wither. I agree that Sun would have to have to do something dramatic to avoid what is looking more and more like an inevitability at this point, but what could stop this slide toward the same fate as DEC? Might they have anything in the works that could save them? What could it be?"
i personally think they are relying too much on gov contracts to fund them and they are losing there because of "cheap" windows computers.
They should acquire BSD, which will teach them how to continue dying... forever.
"Might they have anything in the works that could save them? What could it be?" ...perhaps a nanofactory patent?
yeah fold NOW
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Sun would have to have to do something dramatic
Hey, editors! Edit!!!!
Might they have anything in the works that could save them? What could it be?"
I seem to recall an upper management technologist at Sun mentioning something about a new language, one much different from Java.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Make it clear Java is strong competition for .Net and let MS buy them out.
But they blew that one when they settled out of court.
Apple is not what it once was marketshare wise, but it's still a cool company. Why does everyone want to kill these shrinking companies instead of letting them carve their own niche?
TW
a lot of speculation. I'm sure us Slashdotters are some of the brightest, most important people and whatever we think Sun should do, Sun will do. Yawn! What a waste of time.
IBM has a LARGE national consultant business. Sure, they may stop making AIX, but I doubt you'll see them die off.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Let's take a look at Sun history:
First they built "low-end" workstations. They managed to make a killing at this. Eventually PCs started eating their lunch. So they "reinvented" themselves as a server provider. They did quite well at this until PCs started threatening that market. Then they "reinvented" themselves as a complete solutions company. They did quite well at this until PCs went 64bit.
Now they are "reinventing" themselves as a Desktop provider. They are honestly working to produce one of the most competitive desktops on the market. My current testing of their desktop shows that they still have a little ways to go, but for a first release they've done pretty well. When you combine in the publicity their Looking Glass technology is bringing them with the technologies that Sun is obtaining from Microsoft (I've been told that the next version of StarOffice will have Access support), they are truly posed to begin doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to them: Eat away from the bottom up.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Move over Apple, move over BSD! There's a new game in town, and its name is SUN!
Come on, guys. Everyone's been talking about all these guy's deaths forever, but they're still here. There's a market for all of them.
~Will
sig?
"Might they have anything in the works that could save them? What could it be?"
I hear tell they're developing a new, revolutionary programming language. This one reduces bugs by eliminating constructs that often contribute to them: classes, functions, variables, branching, looping, and mathematical operations.
...an eternal, shriveled corporate coma sucking on the life support of patent lawsuits and royalties... I think SCO would be a much better target for the sentiment of this article: "Dear SCO: Make the world a better place -- just go away already. K Thx Bye"
Why is that useless pile of a company still around??
Solaris is dead.
I also reply below your current threshold.
Start suing their own customers and pick up where SCO just left off in claiming that the GPL is unconstitutional, supports terrorists and drowns puppies. SUN could fund a LOT of anti-linux FUD lawsuits, especially with M$ backing them all the way.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Netcraft confirms it.
How does folding the company stand a chance of increasing shareholder value? Would the board legitimately be able to follow this course of action?
Also do you think anybody would invite them to work at their company after that?
SURELY NOT!!!!!
A move to Texas might do Sun some good,
After all, Sun belongs in the 'Lone Star' state!!!
In business, if you aren't growing you are dieing. There have been exceptions throughout history but, the vast majority of shrinking businesses vaporize.
I have no opinion either way on Sun, yet.
The poor poster is going to be sheep-modded into oblivion now that there's a Flamebait on there, as opposed to a Funny. I'm guessing the post was meant as a joke, rather than to piss people off.
I've worked with Sun hardware for a long time now (from IPC/IPX up through the E10K) and their equipment (sans a few exceptions) is incredibly awesome. It might be on the pricey side but for some reason, they refuse to die! I'm running two sparc20's and a SS10 at home and just love them. Sun's OS (using Solaris 9) is solid and performs well even on this old hardware. I personally think it would bad for business if they went the way that DEC did (worked with DEC Alpha and talk about performance -- nice ...). It's too bad that Sun hasn't tried harder to make their OS competitive with Linux, but then hey, the intel architecture isn't their forte.
If at first you don't succeed, then give up.
"Sun is not coming back. It is a giant company without a business."
I think the article went a bit too far in predicting Sun's demise. Whilst it's true that the rating of their stock is poor and they have really failed in many areas where they would have liked to succeed, I'd say there are signs they may be coming back.
Now they have a collaboration of some description with Micro$oft; it's hard to get an ally with more punch than them, regardless of what you might think (or indeed Sun and Scott McNealy might think!) of them.
They finally seem to be realising that you can't have both the hardware and the software market. Look at IBM and Apple for precedents there. Sun has started a new price war on Linux and Windows on the x86 platform.
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
I really want to know who will end up buying them. Will it be HP? Maybe IBM? I doubt MS would want all the hardware baggage, but maybe Oracle would like the hardware. Perhaps Dell will want the advanced server technologies?
aQazaQa
SCO buys Sun with the little money they have left. New round of lawsuits based on Solaris code being pilfered. New round of Java lawsuits to follow.
Just a bit of info:
Sun's stock (SUNW) is now hovering at about 4.00 (down slightly today).
Here's SUNW over the past 5 years
Casual Games/Downloads
Sun insists that they won't sell Java to IBM. IBM is now quite dependant on Java and have all sorts of ideas for how they would like to change it if they didn't have to constantly butt heads with Sun.
So, okay, fine, IBM can just wait a bit and buy Sun for a reasonable price. That way, Java won't have been released into the public domain and IBM won't have to argue (as much) when they want to change it.
IBM has the most to gain from control over Java -- arguably Microsoft has more but for legal reasons they won't bother even trying to buy Sun -- so they'll be willing to pay the most, so they'll get 'em.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Well on a side note, how much this holds for everyone else I do not know, but the College Board (AP) (they do highschool testing for college level courses in highschool) is switching their cirriculum to Java, instead of C++. From this effect a lot of colleges are now switching to Java to teach programming. At my collge the intro level courses are going to be phased over to java sooner or later (I think its next semester actually). If Sun is really going to die, then a large amount of people have put support into their dying product. I think that even if Sun struggles hardware wise, that its Java platform will continue on. Think of Sega, they went from hardware and game manufacturer to just game manufacturer. Why can't sun do the same?
je suis parce que j'aime
I read a study not too long ago about IBM, it was an updated study I read n the mid 80's
The short of it is IBM could never sell another product or service, and freeze hires, still continue to give raises and pay benifits and stay in business for another 50 years !
Set java free!
.NET.
Open source java and you will reap thousands of supporters who will jump at java, marry it to linux and stand a change of survival against
DO IT!
Sun has something like $6billion in their coffers. At their current burn rate, they will be around for a long time. Their new JDE push (and associated service revenues) could be the thing they have needed to appease stockholders and get back in the game.
Of course, they could just take that cash, distribute it to their employees, lay them all off, then sell their receivables, contracts, and customer base to some other company *cough*IBM*cough*, then split that money amongst the 'execs'. There would be a lot of retired ex-Sun folks lounging around the pool.
One would need to see a lot more client/server integration, but I think if Sun/Apple (one of my labmates suggested Snapple) marketed enterprise solutions consisting of high-end multiprocessor servers serving Java apps to Apple workstations, they might really get somewhere.
It's a gamble, but Apple could only profit from it and Sun needs new ideas fast.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
One out of two ain't bad.
Sun took a little bit of a beating because of cheap servers and cheap clusters. The ultrasparc is still a pretty bad-ass CPU though. Sun has figure out that they need to keep entry level server at around the $999 level and have done so for over a year now. With the new Opteron's and a metric ass-load of cash, Sun is most certainly not going to be another DEC. There are still DEC systems being made (just under the HP flag now), and you can still buy new Tru64, OpenVMS stations, etc...
If my company needs anything beyond the $600 and $700 range, I would recomend Sun any day of the week.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
How could this get posted? It is just as bad as the stupid BSD are dying trolls.
Why would Sun just close shop? Wouldn't any company want to try to go out with a fight? What benefit do they (the company) get out of quiting? Even if things don't turn around for them, they could always hope to get bought out.
Poor Sun.
SCO seems to have found a lucrative business model, if you don't mind becoming a huge douche-bag... Fire the developers and sue your way to profitability.
meh
...and, oh yeah, Java...
This was said as if it was an afterthought. So Sun should fold and allow M$ to rape Java too? Sorry but I'm a big Java fan. I use it almost every single day of my life and I (For one) would really hate to M$ get their dirty hands on it.
Free Firefox news reader.
It's not as if a company with a market cap of of 13 BILLION dollars can just cash out and walk away from the table with 13 billion dollars.
Like is or not SUN, has to keep playing the game. It would loose even MORE money by trying to close up shop quickly.
A company has value for lots of reasons, besides pure, resellable assets: market position, reputation, etc.
What SUN needs is leadership like that which has helped Apple so much in recent years. If you look back far enough, you'll see a time when Apple was in quite a similar postion as SUN is today.
I'm not saying that SUN should start building sPods and sBooks. I think SUN needs to find its place in the market (hint: not the same place as Apple or Dell).
Life is too short to proofread.
It's only a matter of time before corporations start fielding their own militaries, why not start off with Sun?
I could think of worse businesses to do this (not MSFT, there are worse).
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
If they were to really throw their weight behind Project Looking Glass and grab some partners, they could become a competitor in the desktop arena. It's pretty damn cool. Rather than just implement ideas that come from Looking Glass into the Java Desktop System, I'd let Looking Glass become its own beast.
The server market doesn't look too well, and Java can only do so much for them. Unless they can come up with something spectacular out of the blue, I think this that Project Looking Glass is Sun's best option.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Dupe.
Uh, wait. I mean, opinions are like assholes. Heh, sorry. Anyway, it's easy to say something like, "Just give up and close the business" when you're a pundit. You have the plum position of being able to give away advice without having to act on it, and you never bear responsibility for those opinions. They're easy-come, easy-go notions that are basically used to keep readers coming to your publication.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
A company can survive without growing. Wall Street may not like it, but look at Apple, as an example.
Sun has a pretty cool niche - They produce some of the best server-class machines in the world. And I say this as a fairly vocal proponent of using commodity PC hardware whenever possible... I've had the opportunity to use a few decked-out UltraSparc boxen, and quite simply, they rock. A cluster of PCs can do the same task 90% of the time, but when you need high performance in a single box, you just can't do better (I also say that having used some of IBMs high-end offerings, and they just don't compare IMO).
So should Sun fold? No. They need to reprioritize, from growth to maintaining market share and quality. Not cutting costs, not appealing to more of shrinking market, but just doing what they do well.
As for the whole Java debacle... Well, if they can find a way to make money from it, okay. But if not, they need to stop flogging a dead horse, and just bury it.
Sure, Sun are in the doldrums.
Companies do not commit suicide - and the article acknowledges that. Nor should they; an investment in a company is just that, an investment. The job of the directors (unless instructed otherwise by the shareholders) is to run the company in as profitable way as possible.
There is no way that Sun is worth more as cash than as a going concern. Just not going to happen. The very closest you could get to a corporate suicide of the type that this article advocates is a friendly buyout of some sort.
Personally my money's on Sun making a comeback; they invest in brains and research to an extent that to me inspires confidence in their future.
That sort of pollyanna-ism brings in the readers though, so I suppose it's a good tactic.
D.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
For the moment, Sun has opteron servers at a fairly decent price. Don't count 'em out just yet.
Yeah, I know. I spent too much time previewing my link.
in software it developed the Java language - and was duly rewarded for both, becoming one of the greatest high-tech business stories of all time.
How have they been rewarded financially for Java? Sure they have won many developers and carved out a potentially great niche, but it really has not created a huge boom in their server lines, for me, besides the tea-shirts and the cool cofee cups where else have they earned money from Java.
They still sell workstations. Top of the line in desktops is a 2-CPU 800MHz RISC processor. Does anybody care?
They sell Itanium-based servers. Nobody buys them. (Well, actually they've sold a total of 13,000 Inanium CPUs. Not systems, CPUs. This is somewhere under 1% of the server market.) They sell MIPS servers running Irix. Nobody buys them either. SGI isn't even listed in the top five server vendors any more.
Almost all their buildings in Mountain View have been taken over by others.
and stopped wasting time developing and maintaining, for example, their own version of tar or find.
The versions of these utilities that come with proprietary Unices are, frankly, CRAP.
openssh is another one; think back to last year... and the flurry of ssh patches. Linux easy! Solaris hard! Go figure.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
They can't fold now! I heard they were really close to finishing the BSD port of Duke Nuke 'Em Forever!
That's pretty damned funny. Microsoft will be irrelevant as a company within the next decade.The fate that is happening to Sun is destined to be theirs too. Already they're discovering that nobody wants to use their embedded wares, Linux is capping their ability to move into the server space, and their desktop market share has nowhere to go but down. Based on the performance of their stock over the past 4 years, the wall street seems to agree.
Linux and IBM are a great combo and it offers Big Blue a great chance to break free of MS. They picked up on the fact that their OS's couldn't compete with Linux, but their hardware and Linux combined is sweeeeet! You can buy crappy wintel boxes to put your Linux on, or you can buy top of the line stuff.
IBM had to differentiate itself to survive. How do you compete against all the other PC makers when everyone uses the same CPU? Then you have Linux (free), or Windows (which almost everyone uses). IBM can't control the software or the hardware and would have to be the Walmart of PCs to make it with those parameters.
Putting yourself out there as an experienced enterprise powerhouse with your own special Intel killing platforms is the only solution.
From a corporate standpoint, I think IBM has hit the right business model there too. One of the things holding Linux back from wider acceptance is support and guarantees that this stuff is gonna work. IBM provides that. Companies trust that they've tested this stuff and will give them stuff that works....or else they sue them and people get fired.
Unfortunately this is true, there seem to be an internal struggle between geeks and suits, as much as I admire the idealism of Sun they still don't get what the market wants, try to develop a database application with the latest JDK and you will be frustrated, the retarded complexity of Swing and sloppy sluggish end result, recently I regained a little faith of Java after giving up on it long ago, but still the productivity is much lower than comparable tools, the learning curve alone is a major demotivator and don't get me started on the J2EE platform, recently this struggle became visible when top notch suites and geeks walked out of Sun, it is a typical case of lack of vision, Sun is sending mixed messages some times the planning is good but the execution is shoddy at best and vice versa.
As I recall (barely) Intel came to a serious crossroad in the 80's(?), nashing their teeth over dropping their MOS memory product lines in favor of microprocessors. It took an IBM investment to keep the company afloat, IBM being worried about silicon sources for the their new fangled IBM PC.
The point is that Intel got lucky, a moment of crisis cooincident with a funding angel to get them through the transistion. This helped the culture shift quickly in the new direction.
I think the corporate culture at Sun is so polluted with conflict that it seems unlikely they will be scared enough, quick enough, to get every one pointed in the same, and radically new direction, in time to save the company.
I hope this is not the case, when I graduated from college, Sun was considered THE place to be,
cool company with cool products. It's bizarre to see that workstations now are "old iron".
The same can be said for Windows. Unless Sun is going to compete with a Windows or Linux data-center, Sun doesn't have much of a chance. The idea of an extremely powerful workstation is no longer relevant since x86 architecture is just as fast and stable as Sun.
Sun had better follow the ways of HP, IBM and the like, and move toward more current technologies, instead of focusing on what they've done well on in the past, but is no longer in demand.
If they move on, they will succeed. If they try to control the marketplace by telling people they need Sun hardware and Sun software instead of listening to what customers want, they wont do well.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
I would hate to see Sun quietly close up shop and go home. Just like I hated to see DEC get sucked into Compaq.
Like it or not, when Sun started, it had a bold new image of computing that turned out pretty accurate. Much of what they championed are now considered the norm. (The network is the computer).
When Sun started, most of us were using dumb terminals connected to a mainframe. I recall a VP that kept turning down my requests for Sun workstations because he thought programmers just liked them because they were "cool". Then one day, he saw a programmer checking boards from several different locations, and displaying debugging information at one terminal. I never got any resistance for more Suns from him after that. He became a convert.
If you compare J2EE with .Net,
it seems pretty clear to me which one is the
better environment.
Now, if only Sun could figure out how to make
money from J2EE. ;^)
Much of the problem with Sun (IMHO) is in the management of the company. Much of the rest of the problem is Sun's reluctance to adapt to the times. (In part, because of the former problem.)
A lot of large government projects use Sun workstations, and many of them don't have the same pressure as others to come up with a cheaper solution. If lives depend on a system, the fact that you can get something "almost as good" for less money doesn't have the same impact as, for example, a payroll system. Because of that, Sun should be able to maintain a decent revenue stream, provided they don't end up losing more money than they take in.
I would hope that Sun could come up with some good managment that understands the technology and how it can be used, and how best to capitalize on their strengths. In other words, not just the bean counter mentality that so often floats to the top of the corporate ladder.
Where would Java go then? to sourceforge.net ?
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
Hey,
I want to see the new CPU's they're cooking up before anything else happens. I'm tired of the clock-speed game and want some hard, real improvements in the way things are done. No one else is doing it (or successfully anyway, Itanium, for example).
Should they put linux on their new processors? To have any sort of wide acceptance, probably yes.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Silicon Graphics, another early bay-area unix workstation success, was in a much smaller niche, even at its peak. SGI has been circling the bowl now since the late 90's and still hasn't gone away. They barely even lost any money last quarter.
Sun has a much more stable market of business buyers. They have to be selective to get back to profitability, but it's definitely possible, even without a radical change in market. People still pay big money for mid-range and high-end servers. People still pay big money for solid enterprise software. Business customers are willing to pay real money for real solutions. A company like sun just needs to make sure that it solves today's hard problems, and does it at a price that's similar to the competition.
A slump doesn't mean a fall. A re-org doesn't mean a death knell. Sun has lots of chances left to redefine itself, and figure out how to be profitable. They just might have to lose market share and girth in the process.
But Sun clearly needs to stretch their vision much further to survive. Java is still proprietary, and despite its open standards we're only able to use it thanks to their kindness. That's all well and good today, but Sun is a corporation, and a corporation's motivations can change with time. That's one of the points of open source - if they were to open source Java, we'd still like them, but we wouldn't be so dependent upon them. If their kindness ever runs out, Java developers will have a hard time moving elsewhere.
And as Pamela Jones noted on Groklaw this week, Sun may be trying to cater to a growing open source and free software community, but they clearly don't get it yet. Their execs still make Darlian public statements like "Linux is a great desktop, but not a server" and "Red Hat's distribution is proprietary." They don't get it. And until they grok free software and open source, and understand that ditching the lock-in model will make smart customers trust them, no one will respect them as a leader. And if casting aside their leadership potential by persuing lock-in is their only direction, then yes, they should just fold now.
What could save Sun? Well if Linux magically disappeared, and perhaps FreeBSD as well. The truth is that Linux has done far more damage to traditional Unix vendors like Sun than to Microsoft. Today we think of Sun largely with respect to servers but once upon a time they had a decent amount of desktop sales as well. There are a large number of people who just need a decent general purpose Unix box. Prior to Linux many of these people received Sun boxes. However in recent years Linux has become sufficiently capable that ix86 hardware with Linux fits their needs just fine. I've seen rooms of Suns replaced with PCs in both University computer labs and at some chemical firms. This has got to hurt Sun. Sun may survive, but only as a much smaller more specialized company than it's glory days of the 90s. The desktop is gone, the low end servers are gone, ...
Please read before sending flame. If Apple hadn't decided to give up their original operating system for something that people actually write software for, I honestly believe they would be gone by now. I'd be glad to hear a reason that they wouldn't.
As for Sun, I think they have enough smart people to come up with something that will work well, and that people will be willing to buy.
I submitted a poll a couple of weeks ago asking who should purchase SUN. Apple, Dell, IBM, HP, Cisco, DoD, Palm, etc.?
I drank what? -- Socrates
While Sun's competition all sell Windows as well as UNIX and Linux servers, Sun has refused to play in the Windows game. Sun was never big enough to compete directly with the ranks of IBM (AIX) and Hewlett Packard (HP/UX) on both the UNIX and Windows front.
Sun started as a specialist UNIX based Hardware vendor. A great majority of Sun's popularity thoughout the 1990s was directly attributable to the UNIX specialist hardware at a fair price. Specifically their small-business and department entry-level servers.
Pound for pound Sun Hardware is still cheaper than HP/UX PA/RISC hardware or IBM AIX Power/PowerPC hardware. HP/UX and AIX are also at risk, but HP and IBM have more than ample funds to cater to selling extrememly inexpensive Linux based servers. Blue and Brown both are willing to relegate UNIX to Large Scale installations only. Sun's 'entry class UNIX servers', once thier bread and butter, have now been outclassed by Powerful Linux solutions.
Smartly Sun now also sells Linux based servers - but their servers do not have the assumed Windows/Linux flexability of the commodity hardware servers sold by the competition.
My point is - Sun is dying because of IT purchasing agents, like me, who are not willing to buy vendor lock (lock into Linux / lock into Windows). Because Sun isn't prepared to play in Windows, they suffer.
I agree that Windows has something to do with it, but I don't think it's as direct as you propose.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
It is WAY too early to be telling Sun to close up shop. This would orphan their very large installed base, a huge number of customers who aren't willing to fix what isn't broken.
And not everyone has the know-how to build huge networks of cheap PCs a la Google. For that matter not a lot of companies have the know-how to do ANYTHING that Google does.
Until everybody does, there's always going to be a need for large amounts of data processing power inside a self-contained box that doesn't take a room full of postdocs to run. Yes, Sun may stagnate, but the high-end servers from Sun, IBM, HP et al will have a market for quite a long time to come.
The problem, as I see it for potentional buyers, is that SUN is spread so far. They have the server business, JAVA, their burgeoning linux desktop experiment, and countless other projects that, frankly, seem to lack a common direction or guiding force. McNealy can't seem to drive the industry like he once could.
So any tech giant that might snatch SUN up would have to deal with product canibalization and addressing the company's systemic ills.
IBM seems unlikely, since they seem to be pushing the 64bit pro-enterprise market in other directions (read the Power line), but what about HP? They, like Sun, have shown some serious committment as of late to AMD-based solutions. And they might even be able to flesh out their product offerings if they are choosey. I don't think HP-Compaq wants to jump ship on the low-end consumer Windows market, so the Java Desktop System might be on the chopping block, but SUN's enterprise products could, in theory mesh with HP's relatively well.
Just some thoughts. I don't claim to be an informed industry wonk.
In my IT experience there is no alternative to the Sun solution. Suppose you are an ISP, a medium sized broadband ISP (cable co). There is no microsoft solution for holding 2 million + e-mail accounts.
So you go to Big Blue and get some 64 bit linux boxes, you setup some insane cluster and try it that way. I don't see it happening. Sun's support is great, beyond great it's what you'd expect for millions of dollars a year. I don't see IBM matching that. In our environment we've got 4 linux boxes, 15 BSDs and countless Sun boxes.
Sun has a niche market and I don't see the big buyers in that realm going the linux route.
From the article:
It can truly be said that the last refuge of a doomed corporation is its patent office.
Wait, I thought this article was about Sun, not SCO . . .
All sun has to do is the following.... and they'll be back in full swing
1.) Abandon sun sparc hardware and manufacturing. It's too overpriced and everything's available on ebay for 1/2 anyways.
2.) Abandon linux
3.) Pick up Solaris x86 as main platform and improve on PC hardware specs.
4.) Move out of California. Get your headquarter to a cheaper state.
5.) Start selling some killer apps.
I think their main problem is they're a company of engineers who like to do "cool stuff." Someone needs to rein those guys in ("You want to serialize binary java classes into the SQL database? How the F**K are we supposed to MAINTAIN that?!")
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
and opensource Solaris for the masses
along with pushing linux
The correct way to judge the health of a technology company is how many slashdot users believe it to be dying.
Imagine having to have lunch with this guy - boy that would be depressing. You hit some bumps in the road (OK 3 years worth of bumps); solution - give it all up, pack it in. Imagine if everyone took that kind of advice - no company could possibly last more than 5-10 years; people would be jumping of bridges / high buildings at an alarming rate to escape the complete pointlesness of everything. Also was the mispelling of McNealy's name some kind of "in joke" or is the author a complete dick-head ?
Uum, wasn't it just 4-5 years ago that at least one article was published saying Apple should just give up, liquidate everything, and return as much money as possible to its investors???
Also, wasn't it around 1997-2001 that rumors kept popping up that Sun was in talks with Apple to buy them??? And, a lot of journalists publicly said that was the best-case scenario for Apple???
My, how things have changed. I think, based on history alone, that I'll choose to ignore any journalist who calls for any major company to just fold up shop and go home. In fact, I'll choose to purposely ignore any other articles from any such journalist (John C. Dvorak?) as Howard-Stern-like behavior...
Fun time wasting idea: change your comment reading prefs to add +6 to "Flamebait" modded comments. You will laugh your ass off.
When I was learning to drive, a thing my driving instructor said to me has always stuck with me. He said the thing that causes most driving accidents is indecision.
I think companies like Sun (and Corel and others) start to fail when they become indecisive. They need to decide on their path and stick to it, rather than dressing up in a penguin suit one day and mocking linux the next.
Though I would probably let them go into the verge of bankruptcy and get pennies on the dollar. Then in a move of sheer genius introduce the new iproved JAVA Clippy.
Look boss, the flames, here come the flames.
These guys are not selling dog food over the interweb-thingie. They have been around for ~22 years, and have a rather long history of building extremely robust hardware in the server space. (I specified server space because the Ultra5/Ultra10 and the low-end Blades are not great.)
No, I am not a Sun fanboy; I like most of their hardware, and I like Solaris. I just believe that people shouldn't treat Sun like the flash-in-the-pan goofy "technology companies" that made the bubble possible.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I'm not sure about the others, but IBM and HP are are both so vast and are in so many markets (including global software consulting) that the collapse of any single market (ie. selling server hardware) is not going to be enough to threaten them at all.
Btw IBM has been posting rather healthy profits recently - and growing for the last 4 quarters - around $1 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2004, spurred by sales of server hardware.
They're certain in no danger.
What about these possible scenarios:
Apple is definately making moves into the workstation/server space and OSX _can_ play there. Perhaps Apple could buy what's left of Sun in a year ot two (when there's much less than there is now) for firesale prices. This would mostly be to gain acess to Sun's sales channels and some engineering resources.
Or, more likely: IBM buys Sun and then takes Java in the direction it wants to take it. Of course, they also would probably want to wait for a lower price, so don't look for this to happen right away.
Washington Post article on the value of the NASDAQ in 2003 compared to 2000. Yahoo finance graph of the NASDAQ over the last 5 years. Yes, Sun is way lower now compared to where it was than the index as a whole so they haven't recovered but tech as a whole is still down from the heyday of the dot.com bubble.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
Sun's biggest competitors are IBM and Hewlett Packard. Apple computers use IBM PowerPC chips. -- It's the same reason that Burger King restraunts started selling Coca-Cola products when Pepsi purchased Taco-Bell and KFC... Buying from your competition is bad business.
Apple is a desktop provider first. Apple sells servers as well, but only because of the demands for such hardware from companies that have standardized on Macintosh. Sun is a server company first, they have never had the capability of dealing with the commodity business of desktop hardware. The priorities of these two extremely different companies would never mesh. Thus the Culture would always run amok with the competing priorities.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
project looking glass is only a hop skip and a jump away and I want FREAKIN notes on the backs of my web pages.
But seriously, looking glass could haul their dead carcass back into daylight.
I like Sun's massively parallel Niagra architecture. Each chip runs 32 threads in parallel with an impressive 80% efficiency in pipeline usage.
If they can get this off the ground, it'll be great for servers.
Unfortunately, it's lousy for single-threaded compute-intensive processes like chip synthesis and simulation tools which are what I need.
It's interesting that they are kinda going back to the mainframe mentality where I/O and over-all throughput are more important than single-threaded performance, but with the way servers are going, this, I think, is really what is needed.
But perhaps they could make more money by continuing with their current plan of making products and selling them?
it's not going to happen. Do you know how many millions of dollars flow through mainframes and high end Solaris servers? Billions every day people. Sun may become more of a nitch player, but if you look at the next version of UltraSparc IV, it should put Sun hardware back in the playing field. Eventually Sun will have a hard time keeping up with AMD and Intel, but that's not in the hear future. Sun has already made a big round of layoffs, so it's not like they aren't aware of the problems. They were just hoping the economy would turn around sooner than later. Sun execs couldn't have seen how dismal the economy would be and how long it would take for it to rebound. There were no models to compare to, so forecasting wasn't easy.
It's Scott Mc Nealy in a penguin suit! HAR... I hate you all.
Maybe HP will buy them, like they did Compaq. They'll gain in the server market, plus they'll have the Sun OS. Not like they don't have UNIX cred, with HP/UX and DEC and all...
But, I would aquire APPLE. Its been dying since the 70's man.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
We miss you at K5 :( The trolls there have just totally gone to shit of late. Nobody's left but the crapflooders and occational little verbal diarrhea splurts in which rmg talks about how clever he is. Even Tex has just reduced to a constant endlessly-looping "RUSTY STOLE ALL TEH MONEY!" squawking. It's just gotten so boring now that everyone's gone over to masturbate in HuSi's diary section...
I'd rather see Sun completely re-assess their position and find out how they can leverage their core strengths (technology innovation, experience at the server side of computing, understanding of how to use the network as a computing machine, etc.) and implement a new strategy based on those strengths.
IBM re-invented itself. Apple re-invented itself. Sun is capable of doing the same.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's Scott Mc Nealy in penguin suit!
Because Sun isn't prepared to play in Windows, they suffer.
That is like saying "because Ferrari isn't prepared to build economy cars, they suffer". You seem to be missing the point: Sun's real market is not the commodity-server area where Windows is popular. Sun shines* in the area of 8+ CPU machines that actually have to a) bear a heavy load and b) stay up while doing so.
* D'oh.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
That the author's name rhymes with bologna?
second society
I would check on the flop, then flop again on the turn....from there i would raise and reraise and back raise till everyone else folds :)
Sure, they're still looking to finally validate the whole 'we can provide you with a SmartTerminal' concept they came up with years ago, and they're still pushing at the low end desktop, but I'm guessing that's not where the real money is --
They own what's now JavaOne, which was SunOne, which was iPlanet, which was the Sun/Netscape Alliance products. iDS (iPlanet Directory Server) is a very good directory server. [okay, there's a few nice features in OpenLDAP that I wish they'd implement, such as being able to request '+' as an attribute list], and iWS [iPlanet Web Server] is a very stable product as well. I've never played with a production install of iMS (iPlanet Messaging Server), but it has the robust MTA from Sun Messaging Server [which was PMDF, a while back], combined with the message store from Netscape's mail server.
AOL may still hold the name 'Netscape', but that's just for the desktop products -- Sun basically owns the server products. And let's not forget the money they make from Solaris [which again, is a decent product, although I've only used 2.5 to 8... my only real complaint was the lack of support for group quotas]
And the reason that people buy Sun software when they can run NetBSD on the same hardware, with other open source applications? Because they can get support contracts -- SunPS [Sun Professional Services] will do just about everything for you, so you don't have to concentrate on the IT side -- you can just hand it over to Sun, and focus on whatever it takes for you to be a company.
Sure, there are applications where information can be well distributed over a cluster of systems -- but not every problem is unique. Some companies, for whatever reason (even if it's just management's penis envy), are going to go for big iron.
This report said that Sun was decreasing in revenue -- never did it say they were losing money. There's no reason for a company to kill itself off when it's still making a profit.
Sun's got enough arms out there, that I'm guessing they will never completely fold. They might cut off a part that they don't think they can save (like the SparcV development), but so long as one segment still makes a profit, they should stay in business.
[if for no other reason than we don't need all of their engineers fighting with the rest of the currently unemployed people for jobs]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
They should focus on making JAVA better and for more plateforms. Let the hardward dry up and die. They just don't seem to be able to compete in that market and, unless they have a real ringer in the works, it's an anchor that will sink the boat. It's really too bad, I always liked Sun and it was a first class Unix box but the CANCER that is M$ eats all but the most hardy. An Apple Sun combo would be cool but getting Scott McNealy and Steven Jobs heads in the same room at the same time would be quite a trick.
Solaris could be a great platform if they'd just admit they lost certain battles, for example the battle against the GNU fileutils. They can admit they've lost those battles without admititng they've lost the war.
I guess Sun really just wants to "differentiate" themselves from linux, but the fact is that Sun does a whole lot of things just "to be different". At the fricking least they could put a "gnutar" executable in by default so that we can open consistently open tarfiles from linux without running into sun-tar's filename bug. Why is Sun so PROUD of that bug?
It might have had something to do with advertising Java on TV. And their resulting stock price.
So I read the article, and was puzzled why a Forbes editor would ask a company with 13 billion in market capitalization to just fold up shop. So I googled on the author, Malone, and found some interesting gossip. He evidently went to elementary school with Steven Jobs. When Apple was on the outs (remember when Malone suggested Apple should just fold up shop?) Malone wrote a slanderously nasty book about Woz, Jobs, and apple. Here's a sample of from a web page that corrected some of Malone's numerous mistakes:
Malone, the editor of Forbes ASAP, reserves his most caustic remarks for Jobs, with whom he attended elementary school. He asserts that by the age of 19, Jobs had been ''involved in numerous felonies'' and was a drug user, bulimic, liar and cheat -- and went downhill from there. As the head of Apple, Malone says, Jobs was ''a lunatic megalomaniac,'' ''an executive horror and spoiled brat'' who was ''smelly,'' ''paranoid,'' ''vicious and belittling.''
http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/apr99/0054.html
Wow. The guy is a total tool. It's not like he wrote just one bad column in his life. Just going on what google kicks up, it seems like every week we puts his foot in his mouth. But I guess it's like Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern. People don't necessarily like or agree with them, but tune in to listen to them make a complete train wreck out of journalism. It must be the same thing with Malone.
I guess it's one way to make a living. It probably pays better than other media-stunt professions like hosting Fead Factor, denying the moon landing, or mongering JFK conspiracy theories (or more recently, 9-11 conspiracy theories).
Sun is "Beleaguered." I love it!
Now get back to browsing the web on my G4...
Just because a company is down-sizing or having to change with the times doesn't mean its going out of business. The server market has changed a lot in the past few years and Sun is just having a few re-building years. I think its way too early to say they should just close shop. Last I checked people are still buying their servers.
... they should fold after they give me my severance package. :)
--Ben
The grow or perish mentality is related to the fact that capitalism requires an entity, be it a person or a corporation, to perform better than its peers/competitors.
All that capitalism requires is for an entity to take in more money than it spends. That's all. The stock market requires certain other things, but that's hardly capitalism, and playing to the whims of the stock market is probably not the most secure bet in the long term anyway.
Heck no, it's where I get most of my light and heat from!
BINGO in one. The other question people need to ask is. What other companies would stand to benefit if SUN went under? Answer that and you'll see were some of these pundits are coming from. Grass-roots indeed.
I was at Sun back in Feb. of 2003 and pointedly asked the speaker these questions - where were they going, what new products did they have and how were they going to deal with the rise of cheap servers/Linux.
After hearing the speaker waffle on about MadHatter, thin clients, new opportunities and that most-hated MBA word (and I'm an MBA) "monetizing" for about 10 minutes, I realized I already knew the answers to my questions.
At the short and informal reception following the speaker, an engineer who had sat on the panel (but didn't say anything during it) button-holed me to tell me that I had hit the nail right on the head - he said virtually all of Sun was trying to figure out the answers to my questions and as yet they did not have any answers.
Not much is sadder than the rusting hulk of a once great company in total denial.
Microsoft's looks pretty similar.
http://cgi.money.cnn.com/apps/charts?mode=basic
I dunno, or they could just sell their stock at 30 cents and get out. Isn't that how the stock market works?
a rather long history of building extremely robust hardware in the server space.
The article actually mentions a specific moment when the author understood that Sun has no future. It was when listening to a story about a tour of Google facilites -- the Google CEO pointed to the rows and rows and rows of cheap and semi-obsolete hardware which is Google server farm and said that Google will never buy expensive servers again.
The MRCH (Massively Redundant Cheap Hardware) approach is BOTH cheaper and more reliable. Sun IS screwed.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Apple should buy Solaris and Java, then slowly phase out Solaris and Sun boxes in favor of a beefed-up Mac OS X on Apple hardware while integrating Java even more seamlessly into the OS. IBM should buy all of Sun's chip business and over the next several years phase out Sun solutions in favor of IBM's own Power architecture.
Might they have anything in the works that could save them? What could it be?
the iSun.
I've wondered if Microsoft would buy them out before - heavily increasing their hardware division. Why have an open architecture(ibm compatible pc) running closed software(windows). They could in turn sell different components(motherboards with a DRM enabled firmware that only allows micrsoft software or certified by microsoft software, CPU, etc to Vendors such as Dell, Gateway, etc. Or they could go the Apple way. They would have a little glitch that you have to have this firmware to run our software. the only way to get this firmware is on our hardware. where is my tin foil hat?
I think Sun should look around at other companies for really cool technology ideas, and then claim they own the ideas.
And then they could start suing everyone...oh wait. I think SCO owns that business strategy.
Nevermind.
--
"I'm don't know exactly what an AS/400 is, but I'm pretty certain I wouldn't want one up my ass" --Lou
I can imagine if the Sun nuts on Slashdot could moderate ABC's column, they would mark this article as one big Troll.
Personally, I'd have mixed feelings if Sun died. In geneal, I hate Sun. Their support sucks. Java sucks. The Solaris OS doesn't have anything on HP-UX. I've had major problems with Sun support for their Messaging Server product. Everyone I talk to at Sun on the phone is incompetent. But hey... where I work we're historically a DEC/Compaq/HP shop with the best years being the Digital years. So we're a little biased. We recently moved to HP-UX and I have to say that HPs support is much better compared to Sun. Patching the OS is a snap compared to Solaris. There is more of a community of free information exchange around HP-UX than Solaris and the SunOne products. Only recently has SunSolve opened up forums that are middling at best. Unless Sun has some really whiz-bang service or application, I think they are largely irrelevant. My only qualm with their disappearance would be that there is one less opponent to Microsoft. Hopefully, what would happen is that HP would canibalize the best parts of Solaris (what few there are) like they are doing with Tru 64. SPARC? Hah. Couldn't touch the dust that Alpha (and now Itanium) kicks up when it screams ahead of the pack.
Un-news
Sue everyone running .net claiming Redmond stole their IP :-D
You're welcome,
- Daryl McBride
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
Sun still has their own software, middleware, etc to sell. Ignoring the most profitable parts of their offering, their services, would sure lead you to believe they should fold up shop.
Sun still has a reputation as a world class provider of stuff. They just need to hone down the stuff they provide. Like with their Sun Java Desktop. That way they can grab some of those seats back from Windows clients and provide a full end to end solution
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
They could sue Linux users!
Please show me a PC that you can remove the CPU, memory, disk, fans, power supplys, etc. and will still keep running the transactions/services it was purchased for? Ya, that's what I thought...
Hardware wise, Sun shines on the high end transaction servers where you need to be able to do PM and component failover without stopping the applications.
Nope, a Beowolf cluster isn't the same thing; think management and provisioning...
Sun was never a low end star, their compentency is in the high end equipment that has to "Just Work".
With the above "niche" they should do well for some time to come; especially with billions in cash and market cap.
Okay, first we have Google files for IPO from the tech-bubble-is-here-again dept.
Then we have Sun going under.
Hrm.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Solaris 10 will save sun. You'll see.
Hmm, maybe they could sell $699 usd Java licenses, or sue someone for violating their IP.
FYI...I am joking here.
I can't afford a sig!
After getting hammered by the PC market, the comparison of Sun to DEC is a good one. They both were competing with Intel. DEC ended up selling the alpha to intel and having them produce it, ending the competition and settling a lawsuit over IP. The alpha was a great chip, too, but it's dead now.
Sun is also competing with intel and it's hurting them just like it hurt Apple. Businesses realize that they can buy 5 PC's for the price of one Sun, so even the awesome support sun offers pales when compared to the bottom line (provided you're saavy enough to swap a DIMM).
There is one hardware product that they will continue selling, IMHO. Sunrays. These machines rock. I'm using one right now. The footprint and lack of fans are awesome... my office is so quiet I can hear the fans in the machines across the hall and I barely even notice the space it takes up (about 12" x 6"). But this is not going to be enough to keep their thousands of employees.
"I agree that Sun would have to have to do something" Couldn't this have read "I agree that Sun would have to do something" Sheesh! This blurb is nearly un-friggen-readable as it appears now. Could the proofreaders/editors wake up or learn english or something....arggggg
Sun aquired Cobalt and their line of 1U RAQ servers and the Qube boxes, but has now EOL'd them.I don't think Sun knew how to market these after they aquired them.
Big MISTAKE, BIG!
I've been picking these things up cheap on EBay to do various things like web development, back up web, my own DNS server w/edited records to kill spam/ad/malware etc., email etc..
By developing a MediaQube Sun could come in put a box in the home with:
NAT
DHCP
Personal Email server
Personal Web server
HOME Video server
HOME Audio server
DVR backend with compatability to MythTV/KnoppMyth, those Happauge set top interface boxes
VPN for telecommuters and remote workers during imclement weather, part time workers
Home file server (NASRaQ)
One little MediaQUBE that even the clods at home can install & maintain and they could oust sleaszsoft and others media PC's.
Homes are becoming more and more reliant on some of the same technology that business has/now relies on daily. Especially as more and more homes move to broadband cable or xDSL access.
Put some of that brain power to work along with some decent Happaugge DVR350 cards, a decent DVB card for DBS DishNetwork users and this machine could rock. Simple plug up the connectors, and setup via the LCD like the RAQ/Qubes.
It also serves to get Johnny and/or Janey learning Linux! As mom & dad are going to turn it over to them to admin, unless their here already. Sooner or later they are going to want to learn its inner workings and tweak it. So they learn Linux and don't get sucked into the wimpdoze spell.
Recite after me:
MediaQube, MEDIAQube.
1311393600 - Back to Black
Look where they are now versus where they were 10 yrs ago. Evolve or die. Sun isn't evolving fast enough
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Their customer support sucks. I say let Sun evaporite in a wave of Hawking radiation.
He spelled McNealy's name 'McNeely'. Like ten times. If the author couldn't even get the name of a corporate CEO who has been prominent in technology for the last two decades right, why should I give one whit what he has to say about anything?
Maybe it's time for a certain broadcast news organization to 'just fold now.'
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
It would seem that sun should have incorperated linux solutions long ago. I don't think sun is nessisarily dwindling because they make a bad product, I think the problem lies in the cost. You could easily get an equal or better lintel machine for much cheaper than a sparc. I'm sure sun has plans for a new line of workstations. They are putting lintel workstations out there as we speak, (see the v20oz).
lets see /. is a bunch of linux loving trolls .....
BSD is dead long live Linux
M$ is dying long live linux
OS X is dying long live linux
amiga is dying " "
does the skit from montey python ring a bell
' im not dead yet'
sheesh you would think that
o wait, nver mind.
nothing to see here move along.
I personally think they need to concentrate on selling their Linux Sun Desktop Solution. It's a great deal for a complete package including hardware and software. Also don't forget Sun is a major name when it comes to hardware. Their server prices are very competitive with Dell and others. The problem they have is that there are alot of Windows users out there and they aren't supporting Windows. They need to MS Windows certify their servers. The only reason we bought Dell for an exchange server instead of Sun was that it wasn't certified for MS software. If they take advantage of their pact with MS and start making products that support a wider variety of OS systems I think they'll continue to be a power player in the market. They need to back off on chip and Solaris creation and concentrate on lowering their hardware TCO to compete in a broader market.
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"
Sorry, I tried to Google a picture but couldn't find one.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
the reason sun is failing is because its solaris system is slow and cannot compete with linux the peak of enterprise computing power.
a majority of solaris code is stolen from linux which is the pioneer of unix systems from the 90s that everyone copies.
if you want innovation u use the linux, case closed.
Yeah. That'd be a good business model. Sell expensive Sparcs running a freebie OS to compete with cheap PCs running a freebie OS.
In this case Linux was the problem, not the solution.
Sun has been hammered relentlessly for the past 2 years by the tech media. I dare somebody point me to an article with a contrarian view: that Sun will emerge again. But notice they're all saying the same things over and over. In fact, they all seem to be repeating one another.
... CRASH!
When conventional wisdom is 100% in the same direction, it usually ends up wrong. It's like just when everybody thinks the stock market is going up forever and all the amatures hop aboard,
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Budda-ching!
(and I suspect, soon, Motorola)? Motorola? Motor-ola?
They are leaders in embedded tech. What does the idiot think? That because Motorola is going to go broke because Apple is shifting a small volume over to IBM (lets face it, its a small volume, they're great but 5 million CPUs/year is a drop in Motorolla's bucket.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Google spent... oh, roughly $100m in software development getting to the point that they were saving enough money by using the distributed low cost low reliability PCs. That is a huge barrier to entry on such largescale clusters.
And Google is in a business where a little data loss in the searches is not going to seriously harm anyone. So they operate slightly lossy. They admit this pretty explicitly; one of their people, Anurag Acharya, was an invited speaker at the second Evaluating and Architecting System dependabilitY symposium in 2002.
Neither the software investment to make reliable distributed apps nor the lossy data model are acceptable to typical business software. Do you want your bank losing 1-2% of your deposits, or having a consistency check error balancing your account at the end of the month? How about Amazon randomly deleting or inserting a few things from your orders...
And even where there is off the shelf distributed software like Oracle RAC, it's such a management and performance hit that people typically go back to buying larger single system image servers after testing it out... ask Oracle what percentage of their sales are RAC versus straight Oracle 9 some time.
There are applications... web farms spring to mind... where the Google model is a natural fit for the problem set. Strangely, that particular answer was well known five years ago, because people are not stupid.
Until every major business application is naturally and easily distributable larger servers will continue to sell. The software is just plain not there yet. Things are trending that direction; in ten years, the current model is in real serious trouble. Maybe sooner. But now? Don't believe dumb hype.
WHO CARES? My load balancer automatically detects a dead server and routes requests to another one. Then I go find the dude hardware, pull it out of the rack, and throw it into the garbage. For $4k I can replace it.
By the way, using a larger number of cheap boxes gives me on average better performance and better scalability. The age of Le Grand Box for most business uses is dead.
Sun *SETTLED A LAWSUIT* and signed a licensing agreement that basically required Sun to agree "okay, no more lawsuits in future". I fail to understand where this bizarre "Sun is collaborating with MS!" slashdot urban myth is coming from.
MRCH (Massively Redundant Cheap Hardware)
As a daily witness to the horrors of modern acronym overload, I am personally astounded that this one in particular has eluded the "mandatory cleverness" that is required of all recent acronyms.
If the people at my company had come up with this, they would have called it "MaRCH" or something equally cute. Not that I want to give any of you executives any ideas...
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
It was spur of the moment invention for this particular post. And I like the MRCH sound, vowels would just spoil it :-)
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I really like sun, I love the hardware and, I love the software. It is the best UNIX system money can buy, yes, money, somthing you have to spend to get a nice product. I still don't see why /. seems to have SUN so much.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Apple has moved into a post-Microsoft era with succesful consumer media products. There is absolutely no reason for these firms to merge.
"It's the sound of inevitability. It's the sound of your death. Good bye, Mr. McNealy!"
2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2
Actually, Sun just had some of their servers certified to run Windows
Who is this "McNeely" guy anyways? Does the CEO of Sun know him?
Seriously, there wasn't a single fact in this article--only ranting--and they got McNealy's name wrong every single time. Why are we giving it any credence at all?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
"Yeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!"
So, you think we should just use old and/or cheap hardware, and just toss it when it's done with? It's a bad idea, it's like saying own 4-5 crappy cars instead of just buying one nice, stable one that will last.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Sun rode the microprocessor wave. At the same time that companies like DEC had board level CPUs companies like Sun were using the slower but much more cost effective micros. Eventually micros took over because they didn't have the inter chip delay that board level processors did. It took a while but the MicroVAX was an example of older companies trying to ride the next wave. DEC's problem was they just wouldn't give up their OS, VMS. Is all this beginning to sound a little familiar? Sun moving from it's own micros to commodity micros but keeping it's own OS.
The next hardware trend will be Systems On a Chip (SOCs). They will eventually take over just as microprocessors did because of a higher level of integration. SOCs today are much slower then top of the line micro, just as micros were slower then board level CPU were, but they generate a lot less heat. Heat is going to be a critical design factor soon. If Sun was to shift to a network of SOCs with micro Kernels running on each it would be able to compete up and down the computer market. Individual workstations/PCs would have a few, servers and supercomputers would have a lot of SOCs. When the processors and memory are dirt cheap you no longer have to create complex hardware and software to keep them busy. With enough inexpensive SOCs every process could run on it's own processor. No need for complex multitasking hardware and software because you now have lots of cheap SOCs which don't need to be utilized all the time to be cost effective.
PC typically have multiple apps running as well as the OS so it would be easy to have 4 or eight SOCs giving the user good response. Most Server apps are parallelized so they would be good candidates for SOC based parallel servers. For those who still aren't convinced think of it a a cluster in a box with low cost SOCs instead of PC based hardware.
Some say SOCs are the wave of the future and always will be, only time will tell.
I think it is important to see how Sun is doing comparatively...Sun's BETA vs. the S&P is 1.72. That's pretty good. Since the beginning of the year, their adjusted beta is 1.79.
They haven't had a profitable quarter since Q402, but they did breakeven in Q203 and Q303.
They have $3B in cash and marketable securities. They have $2.3B in accounts receivable. Not bad there either. They have $6.4B in total liabilities, but only $1.5B is long term debt. That leaves $6.4B in shareholder equity.
Their price/sales ratio is a measly 1.2. That's pretty low. Maybe the market is underestimating their chances? Or maybe it's the negative sales growth that is scaring people away?
Sun is usually bought for the high-end servers where Linux is not considered a good substitute. I like Linux, but if I need a 64 processor machine with over 200gigs of RAM, I'm buying a Sun. In fact, that's exactly what we use at my firm. We use Linux boxes too, but those are for smaller tasks. The majority of the heavy lifting is done with large, expensive machines like Sun Fire 15k machines. When we have a system problem, we need the machine backup pronto and it really needs to be able to handle the crisis. Suns do that well. So we continue to dish out $3mm per machine and have about 300 Suns in each datacenter. We have other vendors as well of course and quite a lot of other machines, but the Suns aren't going anywhere.
Previously, the only way to scale was vertical. Adding more processors to a massively multiprocessor system was the only way to improve performance on many apps. It was the route took with the mainframe, and largely what Sun took as well.
This worked in a time where software was not available to permit horizontal scaling: distributing load across multiple systems. The difference is simple. Vertical scaling has you purchasing 1 system with N CPUs. Horizontal scaling has you purchasing N systems with 1 CPU each. Until recently, horizontal scaling was difficult and expensive.
This was true primarily because single CPU systems (primarily Intel or AMD) were slow. Our programming languages lacked the ability to gel together multiple components scaled scross multiple systems in a heterogeneous way. Then came XML. XML became the goo that revitalized the horizontal scaling movement. It came at a time when processors were preparing to cross the 1 GHz boundary.
Nowadays, with processor speeds approaching 3.5 GHz, XML easily parsable, and bandwidth on the cheap, it's possible to scale an application horizontally. It's quite easy (JBoss cluster, Oracle RAC, etc) to field a distributed load balanced system based entirely upon software. Lots of times you don't need to go vertical to achieve performance - you can simply add another 1 CPU system into the pool and you're off to the races. Distcc comes to mind as another example of this (a friend just pointed to a Knoppix live cd with distcc installed - this is exactly what i'm talking about with horizontal scaling).
Sun positioned itself in a market that rewarded vertical growth and scaling. That worked for awhile. It still works (there are problem sets that lend themselves nicely to vertical scaling). But, those problems are becoming more and more the outlier and less prevalent. Horizontal scaling solutions are cheaper and easier to implement in a lot of regards. Sun's screw up is that McNealy and company didn't position the company to capture revenues from horizontal AND vertical scaling.
Only now is Sun beginning to offer dual-Opteron based blade servers. Too little too late. If they had pioneered this 5 years ago, they would've planted the seed for a revenue growing crop of servers. But instead, they focused on the big iron and went vertical. Very sad...
Do it for da shorties
I'd like to know what financial motivations (investments, shorted stock, whatever) folks at the Silicon Insider or AbcNews has to run drivel like this.
Now, I'm one of the first to say that Sun is losing a very large share of its market - the lower end. They just can't offer price-competitive counterings to Xeons and Opterons.
However, they've still got the most lucrative part of their market, the ultra-high end. With their big models starting out at about a million bucks (and that's FAR from fully equipped), they've still got plenty to keep them going.
There are still lots of apps that don't cluster well, so a room full of PC's just doesn't cut it. and there are still companies willing to shell out for the hardware they need. Sun will have to scale back on the low end, there's no doubt, but that's not a problem for them. They've always preferred to make a large profit margin on smaller volume.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Of course, this was in late 1997 when AAPL stock was around its all-time low, under ten bucks a share. Pretty soon the iMac came out, and the stock was up almost tenfold over the next few years as the tech boom hit. It's still at almost quadruple those "death" levels.
When the conventional wisdom is so unanimous, it's often wrong.
Buy SUNW?
Yeah, they can call the merged company Snapple!
Oh, wait..
Sun may be presiding over a declining hardware empire, but it retains an advantage in the growing software market that is based on identity management. Specifically, Sun inherited the Netscape LDAP product line from AOL, which evangelized the commercial adoption of LDAP. Yes, Novell's directory server is a strong competitor, but Sun has the other end of the end-to-end solution: the identity client: Java smart cards and JVMs on mobile phones.
Are there quality gaps in the Sun software stack? Yes. But there are two solid anchors in that stack: licensed JVMs on mobile identity tokens (cards, buttons, passports, phones) and licensed directory (LDAP) servers on the back end. Revenue generation from those two anchors will be sufficient for Sun to (gradually, painfully) upgrade the rest of their stack.
Not to mention OSS Java application evolution, which occurs despite Sun, but which value does eventually accrue to Sun. The academic penetration of Java has seeded a generation of bright ideas to be delivered via OSS Java. Those ideas may yet migrate to C#, but for now, the incumbency advantage goes to Java. If Sun R&D can escape NIH, the best of the OSS ecosystem would find a JCP path into their products.
I don't know if Java is a relevant source of income to Sun. I would think rather that it's a drain. It may be that the only value Sun gets from Java is brand name recognition. That in itself is worth a great deal, as it helps you sell other things that aren't a drain. However, that is only true if a competitor doesn't come along to duplicate and improve the Java technology with a catchy, if familiar, name to developers. Also, it wouldn't help if they do you one better and actually establish the clone as an official standard. If the clone should become a standard, it's entirely plausible that Open Source implementations would arise, giving developers Java without the name.
What would be even worse is that if those Open Source guys happen to decide to use the same bullet-proofing that allows the Linux juggernaut to currently cause havoc with Sun's UNIX businesses. You know that killer app that isn't an app, but a license called the GPL. We know the GPL eats competing proprietary licenses for appetizers, and the products attached to them as entrées. I think Sun's main competitor (now bosom-buddy) called it a virus, and are clearly afraid of it as they're the next course on the menu.
No, as long as those things don't happen, Sun should be able to continue on as it has for the past several years without worrying about their product being usurped from under them, and under a different name. No point heading off the disaster as long as such clearly ridiculous fantasies don't come to pass. Even if it would really cost them nothing (just save them a bunch on development and administration cost), and they would still be able to retain the brand name (the only value Java adds to Sun) while Open Sourcing Java.
If they GPL/LGPL'd it, their fears of permanent forking and the product being locked into proprietary platforms would all vanish. And, similar to Linus, they retain brand name, copyright,trademarks and control over the name. The JCP process would remain the defacto standard.
= 9J =
Do you hear that sound, Mr. McNealy? That is the sound of inevitability...
Might they have anything in the works that could save them? What could it be?
I heard from some secret sources deep inside Sun that they're developing a new product called Sun Java Desktop. Basically, it will run a completely proprietary operating system that Sun invented all by themselves, but I hear that it will somehow, through some other proprietary software, support the running of Linux programs. But it's definitely not Linux, I'm told. I trust this information, though, because I met the guy who told me this at the pub while drinking too much Guinness, and he seemed like he wouldn't lie about something like this. He was kind of drunk, too.
If you have Suns, I would very strongly recommend using the GNU tools instead of Sun's versions of compiler, make, etc and using bash as your shell. You might be glad of the flexibility this goves you in the future.
It is about synchronization...
These days I have huge amounts of data to back up. The traditional route is to use a backup device. I forgo all of that and use synchronization. If my data is scattered in an organized manner across multiple hard disks and multiple computers then it does not matter if a computer goes down. This is what is killing SUN. And google is a prime example....
Then again, I studied parallel processing and love this cluster stuff...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
You're are still doomed, though. So long and thanks for Java.
Just because you don't understand something doesn't make it hard.
I've known Sun boxes to be up for years. Can't say that for WinXX...
Looks sun has a solid U*ix based os, but so is linux...
.........
No wait they have a great 64bit CPUs......
SO DO Intel and AMD
They made Java...., But IBM, Oracle and others have created thier own JDK's that are Java 1.4.x complinant as well.
So what does sun sell that you can't get somewhere else cheaper???? Nothing...
As far as the 8+ CPU arg goes, that was true before linux clustering. Now we want 8 CPU's??? we buy 4 2-cpu boxes and cluster them. Not exactly the same, but we can get nice Rack mounted Dual CPU linux boxes from IBM for about 5k. We could build them for alot less, but the company policy is to go with a vendor that supports it.
I don't know what an 8CPU box from Sun would cost, but I'm sure it's more than 20k....
End of Sun.
And these clowns were boasting about how they took pride in hiring Indians and firing Americans. We ll maybe McNeely will set up shop in Bangalore or
New Deli......
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
I believe I read that M1A1 Abrams tanks have computer systems designed by SUN in them. The reason? just as you stated. They can take a round to the tank, loose many critical components, and still have control over the weapons, life support, communication, navigation, and engineering systems.
The Mars rov ers are also running some old "slow" chips because they are hardened and reliable (and draw less power). There is something to be said for getting to "fast enough" and then looking ofr other factors to favor - like reliability.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Which is great for Google.
But if the aggregate work can't be partitioned efficiently or at all, clusters of small computers don't as well as a big honkin' Sun 15K or IBM mainframe.
Quote from article summary: "I agree that Sun would have to have to do something dramatic to avoid what is looking more and more like an inevitability at this point[...]"
"Have to have" "more and more"...try explaining the sublime nature of English when people write sentences like that.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Only assuming everyone does what Google does, and has know-how to do it. It's just like ignoramuses that claim big Beowulf clusters can solve any and all needs for computing power. It just ain't necessarily so.
There are great opportunities for MRCH; but there are places for big-ass servers (and even mainframes). The latter niche is and will be shrinking, but it's not disappearing completely any time soon.
Sun and SCO have an agreement. Sun will not be sued by SCO.
I remember that same question being asked on one of Sun's quarterly launching presentations.
What's good for the stockholders (who are mostly playing the system, not investing) != good for company.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Sorry, it's not just that PCs are cheap. IMHO Sun has forgot how to design a CPU. Or a chipset. Sorry, 1.2 GHz just doesn't cut it, no matter what IPC you have.
Since when are equal processor speeds equal to the same level of performance between processor families? I forgot, you're an Intel weinie.
- crap outdated components and cards at ludicrious prices (E.g., is that an ancient ATI Rage that they're selling for almost $500? Well, gee, in the PC world you can already get a GeForce 6800 for that kind of money.)
Toy boy, since when do you need ANY graphics card in a server?
You really have no idea what you're talking about and your post is disinformation.
Fools like you 'running' a hardware installation is why IT always looks so bad, with all the unreliable equipment and constant downtime. Cheap doesn't mean a damn thing if the software's always unavailable. And besides, this is the description of a small tower Sun's got:
Fight Spam! Join CAUCE! == http://www.cauce.org/
Look, if you don't like SUN sell your stock in the company. Sun has owners/investors, it's up to them whether or not they still want to invest in Sun and they can decide on an individual basis. It's called the stock market.
Calls for a company to fold are FUD, pure and simple, usually this FUD comes from someone who doesn't have a cent invested in the company and therefore no direct meaningful interest or someone shilling for the competition.
They said the same thing about Apple just before Steve Jobs brought them back from the dead.
If you want Sun to fold sell your stock and go away quietly, if you don't own stock then what is your real motivation in wanting them to fold? It certainly isn't the financial interest as an investor which is the only legitimate cause for the call.
big iron box mainframes are still sold because clusters of smaller machines don't have the sheer transactional IO that some jobs require. Financial services come to mind. Not much CPU power is required (mainly just some simple math), but when you need to reliably and quickly update millions (or billions) of small independent records, you need serious IO channels to and from memory, a huge disk-buffering system and dedicated hardware to maintaining transaction integrity. All that is better done in a big box where the IO channels are short runs (and in fact, may be all but impossible to do it any other way)
Clustering work well on big CPU intensive jobs that can be parallelized and you're generally doing more CPU work than IO.
-
>Then I go find the dude hardware
Since 1995, the bread and butter of my company, Sun Microsystems, has been the servers. Why are sales collapsing just at the time when IBM servers, which are also based on proprietary processors, are winning customers?
The answer is that the UltraSPARC III killed our servers and the company as a whole. I was right there from the inception to the eventual 3-year-late roll-out of the UltraSPARC III. It was one huge design flaw.
The next-generation servers in my department (in the commercial-server division) were sitting idle and waiting for the new UltraSPARC III. Unfortunately, the UltraSPARC III did not show up until 3 years later. By that time, the processor was woefully behind its competitors in terms of performance. Internal tests showed that our servers also underperformed the competition -- particularly the ones from IBM. The problems can be traced back to design flaws in the UltraSPARC III.
To understand the logic behind what I am saying, imagine what history would have been like in the last 3 years if Sun had delivered its UltraSPARC III on time (in 1998) and if the processor was equivalent in performance to the IBM Power4. Sun would be growing marketshare and mindshare. Our revenue now would be soaring with the rest of the economy.
The processor design team killed the UltraSPARC III. The UltraSPARC III killed the server business. The server business killed the company.
Its inevitable.... The price point is moving downwards.
No cowering here: UltraSparc is a dog. It was a dog when it was new, and there's no reason to think that the performance delta between Sun's SPARC and the rest of the general purpose CPU market is going to improve. It's a dead ISA walking.
I don't understand why anybody, anywhere, buys Sun. Their service has been terrible for several years, hardware quality at least as bad for at least as long, and performance has ALWAYS been dismal.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
sic
So much for my sounding informed. I'll have to look into this, I may put Sun back on my Vendor list.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
If I want to grow to a 12 or 16 way machine, from Sun, I have to BUY a 12 or 16 way chassis. Even with 2 or 4 CPUs.
Linux clusters are a great marketing word, but if you have a cluster that can do what my 12 and 16 way Oracle servers can do, let me know.
"Linux CLusters" that I've seen were all MATH clusters.
I expect that the SPARC will die and sun will be offering 4 and 8 way Athlon64 boxes REALLY soon.
Sun has (cray derived) backplane switches (not available on PCs), TREMENDOUS I/O possible. and finally some decent PCI, but even on a lame PCI E4500, I have SEVERAL separate Busses. My 4-way Intel boxes have, er 1 PCI buss. great.
Ever pull a processor board from a running PC? and it kept running?
Me neither.
Now sun's competition on cool features is SGI. Take a gang (32 of, max) 4-way SGI's and join them into a single box. scales a LOT better. But SGI isn't going to kick anyone's ass.
Won't the world be boring when nobody innovates in computers. When "BIOS"s are how people think computers should boot. (and mcneely might eat in a New Deli, but it might be in New Delhi)
Actually Sun is more like DEC or the old IBM. They're stuck in the old way of doing things. The days of proprietary enterprise hardware are gone. Why buy a Sun Ultra Enterprise when you can buy 500 cheap PCs at the same price? Sun offers nothing that isn't available at much less cost on Linux on commodity hardware. What do you think when a company gets bids from two vendors for a project. One uses Sun hardware/software and costs 4 times as much as the Linux solution yet has no other real advantages. Not to mention per client licenses, etc. I dunno which one you'd choose, but the choice seems simple to me. They're pretty much irrelevant at this point in the game, other than the fact that they own Java. There's no room to keep them around for sentimental value.
Y'all are missing the point - the question is not whether or not SUN has superior or inferior hardware? The question is: does it justify staying in business?.
In short, no. If they're bleeding money and talent to other companies, then it's time to sell the company and let the chips fall where they may. They should not be kept on life support just because technically, they are perceived to be or are superior.
Ultimately, it isn't about technology, it's about money and the investors.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Why does nobody mention the high end stuff that Sun has like the E10K's or E12K's, There are some very demmanding applications that require loads of memory and processing power that I would just _not_ trust linux with. I work for a telco equipment manufacturer and we use these babies for a lot of the accounting and billing stuff, one good example is an E12K with 10 gigs of ram and something like 132 CPU's which can handle over 1 million prepaid call authorization transactions per _second_ for a mobile phone network. Try doing that with a Linux cluster, not to mention that Sun has some pretty good support options, altho expensive it is something Linux largely lacks, that thing called accountability that managers like so much. They may have lost it in the lower end but there is still a big market for the higher end and Sun's hardware is pretty sweet. /g.
This "Micheel" Malone gangsta guy tells a good story... but if he can't get the name of his subject's high profile CEO right, how seriously can he be taken?
Hey, I do have to say that Sun has been making some good strides in the development realm using Java. Especially in Databases. I love Java. Although, I also love C. However, if IBM acquires Java I fear for our community and the ability to develop openly. If Microsoft acquires power in deciding where Java is going to go I'm going to make the complete change to Linux. Too many developers out there complain about Java and its steep learning curve and ignore the potential and capability that it has. Look at Visual Basic though, its basically a non-thinking, non-innovative way to develop Microsoft-only solutions (because its easy and dumb-downed). Enough is enough already. Sun may not be profitting right now, but I won't go as far to say they are dead.
As pal says above they need to reformulate. Partnerting with Microsoft sucks for all of us Java and C folks, but if they can update their server market and engineering techniques as well as creating some initiatives in the realm of Java develpoment (like the Academic Initiative they'll be fine. Think of how RedHat stock kept dipping after its initial public release. It may not be a similar instance, but its an illustration of growth that Sun needs to follow.
We Run serveral thousand users per hour on a cluster of IBM 2-CPU boxes. If one goes down (which they haven't in the 2 years we've been running it) we would just slide another box in. I agree it is NOT the same, but for alot of apps it's good enough. Our DB is an HP-NonStop box which has way more than 8 CPU's....
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
I think the worst part is that it looks similar but is very inferior. Apple is focusing 100% on cocoa, Java is an afterthought. Just my humble opinion of course.
Thse are great ideas that still have a lot of life in them.
I have some friends that work at Sun who say there is a power struggle between those who want to continue with Sun's current business model and those who want to pursue software. The latter want to make Java profitable (yes Java). Heck, we may see the Sun logo in the gaming market sometime soon. A licensable Java VM on videogame consoles, its being worked on.
If Sun only got their stuff together, we could see some beautiful things from Java and true hardware independence. This is where the future is, software, not what box its running on.
"I agree that Sun would have to have to do something dramatic to avoid what is looking more and more like an inevitability at this point, but what could stop this slide toward the same fate as DEC? "
Funny that this comparison should be made - was talking to a Sun employee about to be laid off about 2 years ago - he was making comparisons to DEC at the time.
That premonition has now popped up on Slashdot and i've got goosebumps over it.
My view? - yeah - Sun should throw in the towel and get their engineers over to SuSe/Novell pronto. At least McNealy and his execs has a few million in the bank so they are ok.
DEEP BREATH - "go away Sun - you are in the way of open source" - AND EXHALE
as a general rule, yes some exceptions, but as a rule, mac folks don't switch. They may ADD to their fllet of boxes, but they alwas have a mac running there. Apple has a name for "just works" at a slight premium over "you take your chances" machines, and always has. They also have some smart guys who know how most people think, that's why they went the heaviest into GUI over all other vendors, hardware or software. Now I'm not saying they SHOULD merge, but IF they did they COULD come up with a super integrated system that went from the lowliest laptop to big iron, that "just worked", and would fall in price below conventional big iron, but still be quite the deal in functionality. A top to bottom solution for single people with one computer to big enerprise ega systems. All Apple lacks now is big iron expertise, and they are taking steps that way, one step at a time. You see, I wouldn't consider sun buying apple, I would think the reverse would be more productive.
c
Coincidently, typing this on my old powerbook 1400, when a few days ago my linux box, with zip changes on my part, decided to no longer go online or remain freeze-free. Tried 4 modems, nope. Even then it will only stay up around an hour before it freezes up. I like linux, but......
it needs work still it appears..... There's obviously some major problem, but dang if I know where it is or how to fix it, like where do you look? I can do "some" stuff, but guru I am not, and yoda ain't handy to voodoo fix it.
My old mac though, drug it out of a bag, it's been stored for a year, fired it up, added in the new isp details, didn't even have the exact modem in a list, just used a generic modem script, poof, back online, 0 problems. Never got ownede with it either, because it ain't possible far as I know unless it's physically handled by mr. badguy. Remotely, in a non server config and no apple sharing turned on, I don't think so. maybe it is but I never heard of it, my apologies if there's a way to do it.
Stuff like that makes mac loyalists. It works great for the most part, secure, and don't break too much, that's the philosophy mac brings to the computer table, they make it easy to use and not break, and I ask ya, what's wrong with that? They drag that dictum to Sun, tell em to "get it" until they do, get rid of the cruft, see where they can integrate, and it just might work as a full vertically integrated computer company, something for everyone. sun only offered something for every person with really deep pockets, and it got expensive from there.
But, total wag on my part, no idea but I've thought about it for several years now as a possibility that might fly.
Sun's COs claim that they need to maintain tight control over the Java library source code and standards to insure Java cross vendor "write-once" portability. This was the main point for Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft. In fact, in the DOJ case the federal appeal court did find that Microsoft had deceived Java developers, which the court decided was in breach of the Sherman Antitust act.
For Sun to call their settlement anything but a sellout, Sun could at least persuaded Microsoft to create or adopt a modern release of Java to replace the 1997 eon MSJava JVM. Instead Microsoft gained the right to extends life of its Java Virtual Machine to December 31, 2007. Microsoft have stated that it will not be improving ( or updating ) the old JVM and Microsoft's J# "upgrade path" still uses non-standard interfaces for GUI's and .NET libraries. This leaves Microsoft free to play the old "standard" embrace, extend and enclose anti-competitive tactics.
Sun' s James Gosling claims, in response to this article and some "slashdot flamage" from the same author that though the new settlement, Sun has gained the right to selectively access Microsoft's Communications Protocol Program. This ablity to selectively pick and choose and other "flexabilities" was a detail left out of Sun's press release, and more interestingly, the recent joint status report on Microsoft's complicance with the US DOJ final antitrust judgement.
If SUN really cares about re-inventing itself, it should start buying back its outstanding shares. There are about 3 billion shares outstanding and at $4.00/share, they wouldn't have enough cash to buy all of them...but they could start now. Hell, they could produce a couple really bad quarters, drive the stock price down to $1.00 and buy all the shares with half of their cash reserve.
After that SUN could focus on new technologies without the stockholder pressure.
-ted
Microsoft buys out Sun, gets rid of the hardware, strips the company down to the basics, but keeps all the IPO. Puts an end to various Sun projects like Solaris, OpenOffice.Org, StarOffice, etc. Dominates Java and then announces that only Windows/Longhorn will be supported by Java and nothing else.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Finally Apple is not the company slowly dying...
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
No, no, no. Sun is not equal to DEC in their demise. Ken Olsen, anyone remember the infamous CEO of DEC, was notorious for missing every major computing trend after initially pegging the minicomputer revolution in founding DEC. Also, DEC's, read Olsen's, proprietary strategyies in both h/w and s/w make Microsoft seem downright Linux-like in comparison. :)
If Sun is indeed to go down it will find its own way to morph into a smaller and smaller company. An entire generation of minicomputer makers went away in the 80's and 90's - Prime and Wang to name two. DEC was the biggest and last of a generation.
IMO, if you want to see the future of Sun, look at Silicon Graphics. PCs slowly ate their lunch until they became a marginalized player in a niche market.
McNealy is looking for a nicke to crawl into.
database? Shell? Marathons?
If you're running a FAILOVER system, well that's different. The most marketing use of the term cluster (which we define at least 6 different ways, but a good definition is "a group of machines simultaneously working on a set of tasks").
Failover doesn't really take advantage of a couple cabinets full of 2 and 4 way machines running a database. In fact, you're showing WHY I'd want a 16 or 32 CPU box running a database.
which explictly granted them the rights to protect themselves agains sco lawsuit. They were one of the first companies to indemify there customer base (using solaris)
Sun is going in the direction that all proprietary software companies are going.
Free Software displaces the need for proprietary Solaris or Windows, yet it provides great benefits for the companies who embrace Free Software.
When Sun make Java Free Software, and they will eventually when their stock has plumetted far enough, they will be able to become full members of the Free Software community and reap the benefits.
You can read more about the GNU project at http://www.gnu.org/.
I'm certainly no Sun fanboy, but I know they're sitting on a lot of cash and so have some time to figure out what they're going to do. Personally, I'd hate to see Sun disappear, just like seeing Dec go away brought tears to my eyes and I think it is a horrible shame.
I think one of the biggest problems facing us is Intel/PC architecture. A one size fits all solution isn't going to do any one thing exceptionally well, but will be mediocre at everything. I think putting PCs everywhere for everything, is a big mistake. I think certain things need dedicated systems engineered to do those things well. Current trends I see, in my opinion, are to the detriment of the whole human race's progress.
I'd like to see Sun survive, because I'd like to see some diversity in the computing architectures and some choices, you get cheap intel with your choice of windows or linux, or an apple, is all good but I think falls short. I think there is still a place for Sun out there, and I think there has been a lot of people who have sacrificed more than they bargained for in the move to Intel.
In my view it seems like the worst architecture and the worst o/s won the race. I know w/intel isn't all bad and via modularization and volume and dramatically increased speed and reduced costs which is a good thing. I guess we'll never know how it would have been had Amiga/Atari/etc other solutions survived to evolve.
They aren't making any profits and haven't made any in a long long time, so why not become a non-profit and be honest about it?
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
they're going to go under because solaris is a nightmare to administer
I have nothing bad to say about slowlaris, but their Ultrasparc cpus sucks bigtime and they have puny IO.
I manage both SGIs, SUNs and general whitebox linux, but Slowlaris and irix are way ahead of linux in stability and hardware capabilties. Linux is nice for up to 4 cpus and a few IO devices.
SGI has some nice features on their linux'es though, but they are still crippled by the linux kernel limitations, gigabit ethernet performance is inferior, and NFS server is terrible. (50Mbyte/s write to server, while Slowlaris and Irix has ~95MByte/s from the same client).
Currently SUNs best asset is their OS, but it can't help them as long as it runs on a crippled CPU.
This post is so dead on and includes facts to back it up yet it gets only a score of 3, insightful?
Just because one doesn't like his opinion doesn't make it less insightful. I only care because my filter is set at 4...
I worked for Sun for a while last year as part of an internship.
I saw a lot of problems, and they still have a lot of dead weight in terms of staff, but they really do seem to have a plan.
The N1/Grid stuff is a big part of where it is at. Grid in particular, since it works NOW it great. It's also open source. (Search for Sun Grid Engine)
Perhaps the most iumportant thing though is that Sun is the only major company with multi core CPU's in the pipeline.
It takes a long time to design a chip and get it into production. Sun are the only big company that is pushing for multi-core architecture. 32 systems on a single ship makes the price suddenly insanely good. And Sun are hte only ones doing it.
N1, Java, the Java desktop,multi-coreCPU's and Grid are the main reasons why Sun is going to stay around.
At the same time, they perhaps need to pay a little more attention to their engineers and the fact that they may need some help with understanding what it is they are supposed to be developing.
I attended a meeting with Johnathan Schwartz, then head of software (he's been promoted now.) and a bunch of engineers in Menlo Park. One guy asked about Sun's fiscal policy - what kinds of things should we focus on? What kinds of things are most important to our customers?
Mr. Schwartz's answer was "You don't need to worry about that." and then said something to the effect of (not a direct quote) "Just do your job, leave the rest of it to us, focus on whatewver your manager tells you to do."
The emphasis was on having the engineers build great systems, not on having the engineers build great systems that make money.
*sigh*
Lots of incompetence in my time there, but lots of amazing engineers as well. If they would simply stop isolating engineers from business descisions, Sun could be great again.
Fujistsu has a large stake in Sun and has bought other Sparc companies (Ross Technologies, and HAL)... and I think Amdahl. Fujitsu also builds super high end servers (128+ processor).
But... Sun has a great track record of bouncing back when everyone thinks they are down for the count. In the early 90's things did not look good and the company came roaring back in the mid-to-late 90's.
I think the article was poorly written and provided no data to back up the authors position
GigantanKramePithicus
Speculators might be more interested in whether the company was growing and whether the stock would go up. But the basic idea of investment was to be a part owner of a company so that you could share in the profits.
Of course, tech companies in particular need to retain some earnings to fincance new things, but this business of just sitting on billions and billions of dollars is... weird.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Back when aohell bought Netscape i thot a better fit was sun. seemed so obvious to me. Open source is the only hope against M$. Moz needs a big corp+$ to 'steer' it. sun needs frontends for it's servers.
Cheap sun(amd) + best browser = hope for sun else m$ wins
my other sig sucks less
To be accurate: in any sufficiently large group of people most are average. Equally accurate (based on tests and statistics): in any sufficiently large group of people most are relatively idiotic when compared with me. This is probably also true of you and most other slashdot readers. In any sufficiently large group of slashdot readers I'm near average.
There isn't anything in the UltraSPARC chip that makes it particularly suited for massive SMP or not, other than a lot of L3 cache, and not running insanely hot.
A dual CPU motherboard from Sun is specifically designed for that scale, it's not like there's a few errant unused pinouts that can make it magically scale to 8 CPUs.
The 8-way systems and larger have special crossbars and infrastructure that make them scale, but are incredibly expensive.
The UltraSPARCs themselves don't really have much to do with it. It's all about massive internal bandwidth.
You could acheieve that scaling on x86, but it'd be hella expensive, and you'd probably have to throw out the Intel MP specs for something more ambitious to get the scale-up and cache consistency without sacrificing performance. At which point someone says:
"I thought using x86 was supposed to save us money?"
And so that's why no one does it. (Well, except Unisys EMC, but they're off in their own little world, catering to those Windows shops with tons of money)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
How did sun get its start? By delivering "open standard" BSD unix boxes that undercut all the proprietary unix boxes. True. I once had a sun box with a serial number less than 100, one of those they built in a garage. How are they dying? You guessed it. There has to be some sort of karma effect here :-)
Doesn't this situation resemble Apple's scenario a while back? A lot of people thought that Apple was going to go bankrupt, but instead it got innovative. I think Sun Microsystems could do the same thing.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
I have this feeling that Solaris would run bitching on a modern Power5 platform, especially w/Hypertransport providing the IO.
For all I know they've tested it on a G5 and gotten it to work. I bet that'd scrap the Ultra V in a heartbeat, requiring them to reassess where their going with their hardware line.
Just speculation, mind you.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Personally, I'd really hate to see the low end UltraSparc IIi line die out, as I deploy those with OpenBSD Sparc64 on a rather large scale...
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
The article actually mentions a specific moment when the author understood that Sun has no future.
People like this author who are so black-and-white on the issues are people who have real issues of their own. If this guy thinks he has finally once-and-for-all understood all the universe and Sun's place within it, then he must also expect that he will be considered a god among the world's peoples for the next several millenia (hey, it worked for Jesus and Mohammad). In other words, this guy is an ass.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
If you remember. Not everyone at DEC lost their jobs. No no reason to fold - someone will buy them.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Memory is nice to be able to replace while the system is hot, especially when you can tell if it's going bad ahead of time (ECC).
Some x86-compatible systems _can_ do that, but they definitely don't save you money over Suns, that's for sure.
CPU, PCI cards? Not likely to need. If you fry a PCI card inserting a cable, chances are more than just the card is fried (and maybe you don't know it yet). Hotplug is nice though for a different reason, dynamic reconfiguration.
Really, it's the disk drives that you care about being redundant/swappable. They tend to fail more frequently as they have moving parts, and they store what is most valuable.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
it doesn't matter what you run it on. It needs to be multithreaded to work on a mainframe as well. And you still want to limit thread-to-thread communication to avoid scaling issues.
Not that midframes and mainframes are useless then. They are much less latent than a cluster and can potentially provide more throughput.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Thank God for Sun's death. I hope their swan song is soft and quick. It could not have happened to a better company. My dream is only half fulfilled, however. Sun's Java garbage will continue to pollute computer science for years to come I am afraid.
you won't catch any fish if you don't put bait in the water.
The type 6 keyboard is not something you would want to spend a significant amount of time with. Having to convert your favorite keyboard/trackball to USB in order to use it, not to mention being in a position where there isn't enough space to use a regular PC -that's not good stuff. I like the idea, it's a cool idea. You can put together a quiet PC if you work at it. Besides, not being able to plop a CD into the drive to listen to it kind of sucks.
It's interesting that Sun is producing these end-user products, desktop solutions, products designed to simplify cubicle management - but the thing about it is, cubicles are bad news for workers, just like assembly lines are. OK, I'm being picky, but it's sort of like using your physics degree to make stuff that kills, injures, and maims people, and causes immeasurable suffering to thousands of innocent people.
The future of the end user workspace revolves around ergonomics. Sacrificing the PS/2 interface, sacrificing a choice of video cards, sacrificing the personalization of your work environment for peace and quiet is just not worth it.
I only wish one thing - just one thing. If Sun wants to provide solutions for the end user, solutions to manage large offices filled with cubicles for call centers or whatever, I would wish (I feel it's their responsibility) to focus on ergonomics. The type 5 keyboard was OK, but the type 6 is not as good, and give me a Microsoft Natural any day. For $1000, I can put together a whisper-quiet, awesome, upgradable Linux box where I have the choice of peripherals (Ok, not the high-end peripherals for $1000), but I could choose the trackball/mouse from a huge selection, I could choose the keyboard from a large selection, I could choose the graphics cards and monitors from a large selection that is not overpriced (Sun's entry level monitor is over $300, you can buy a comparable one for probably half that). This stuff adds up in terms of job satisfaction, upgradability, configurability, and things like that.
But overall, even if they charge twice as much for what is essentially a normal 17-inch monitor with a Sun logo on it, even if the price of a used PC is half that of a new thin client - I wouldn't object to that one bit if there was even one bit of consideration for the ergonomics of the keyboard/mouse combo. It's just that ergonomics, and ergonomics includes things like how are you going to rotate those 3-D windows with your mouse all day long and not get sore? It's the design of the window manager as well. So to make a long story short, there is just no emphasis that I can see on ergonomics. I think that this is sad, and short-sighted. It's obviously not being thought through from the perspective of the end-user, it's being thought through from an apersonal point of view of a product line, or something like that.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. On a personal level, it's much more, at this point, about whether or not people LIKE Sun products, not whether or not they are going under. A lot of the products that Sun puts out are too expensive. Monitors are a good example. RAM is another example. The ultra-high end SMP boxes are going to have viable alternatives as the price of other offerings keep dropping. The competition there is probably from the lower-end mini mainframes; if not now, then soon. SMP Intel and AMD 64-bit motherboards. 4-way, 8-way.
It's like they are spread too thin, trying to do too much, but not doing anything in a very visionary or progressive manner. Instead of questioning what the user wants and needs, they are trying to combine what the company needs with what users might need, still adhering to the same "$600 toilet seat" strategy. They should perhaps think about hiring a priest and maybe having the hardware recieve a special blessing, then they could sell it at those ridiculous prices.
I wish that they would just get real.
She has every right to an informed opinion, having at one point chosen to live in what was still then East Germany for several years.
She makes a convincing case that it was Russia that won that part of WWII which paused in 1945, but that Korea, Vietnam and other skirmishes were in reality just WWII continuing. It was certainly the Russians who took the losses and the Russians who first pushed Germany and Japan back into and beyond their historic borders, but the Americans, who had kept themselves safe from early losses while playing both sides, eventually jumped in on the coat tails of the gallant and then still significant British Empire who had only just managed to hold off prosepctive invasions of Britain and Australia. So it was the Americans who were able to finally deter the Russians from completely driving the fascists from Europe and East Asia, as they would have otherwise done within months, and American capitalism which was ultimately shown to be at war with Russian socialism.
My own opinions have become rather jaundiced and impractical, but I am starting to think we might all be better off with one bottom-up political party than continuing to pretend there are useful differences between twin top down parties, not that bottom up has been tried much outside Switzerland. And if the real dividend of the cold war was to make shopping the most desirable human activity, then it may really not have been worth winning.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
concentrate on IA-64 or AMD64 servers, continue the effort started on Solaris x86 and sell Java.
That's it, that's all.
Sun's computers are nice and all, but mainframes they are not.
... they do not have the resources to compete with IBM head on.
IBM is moving down into Sun's territory with their pSeries (and Sun never really had a realistic alternative to their mainframes). x86 is always moving up, and where it will stop noone knows, and the only hope Sun has is hitching onto the x86 bandwagon now
Sure, but isn't gmail running on the same distributed system? So they must be able to do things without loss. Unless it eats people's email?
Dead on.
Then I go find the dude hardware,
Was that a Dell reference?
pull it out of the rack, and throw it into the garbage.
Apparently so! ;-)
I'm going to assume the Extra Large 440 here with the following specs
Sun Fire V440 Server
Dell PowerEdge 6600
Total Xeon based savings in our little HORRIBLY INACCURATE study $50,449
However we all know that most people buying Sun software don't care about the price so there is no point anyways.
SUNW stock has been low for quite some time now. I think since 2001. However, the only thing which happened is that SUNW is not that hot .com ready for action ticker anymore. They have become an older company which ain't what these Wallstreet Hustlers want.
.com hype on Wallstreet. The business oportunities for SUNW are just not that hot anymore. currently. BUt SUN can still move independantly, which means they are still alive.
Does it mean its customers don't want e15k servers anymore? Of course not. Whats happening is more like the end game of what i would call the
Don't allow yourself to be fooled by these dirtcheap Wallstreet editors and propaganda writers. Cause thats _all_ what they are!! These "journalists" just write stories , _they_ like to see happen.
If SUN would come out stronger after this, these same idiotic so-called journalists are reported to go raging mad, not to see their writings being transformed into wishfull self fullfilling prophecies. Wallstreet and its destructive propaganda media should get a huge haulover and firm kick in the butt.
What is evident though is: SUN needs some new blood. And yes, no business school kiddo's, but some genuine MIT techies. Why don't they put Bill Joy in charge, instead of some total useless business school type as Schwartz? The only thing wannabee CEO's learn these days is the outsourcing trick. They better outsource Schwartz to Mars.
Robert
e-mail is not a reliable system. Take a look at these. e-mail's level of reliability won't cut it at a financial institution or many govt agencies.
Claim they own all of the code to linux, then start asking for lisences. When everyone calls their bullshit, sue a bunch of high-profile linux users because they won't pay-up. Sounds good to me.
Sun needs to stop wasting time where the little guys can run circles around them and do things only they can do, like develop a version of "solaris" that can present a cluster of 500 inexpensive suns as a single system with terabytes of ram and petabytes of disk.
Companies who are conditioned to buy "solaris" but have been flirting with cheap pc clusters would be much happier migrating to another product offering from Sun.
Malone is definitely a kook. He's been bashing Sun for years. What's amusing though is to wait and see who repeats his stories or links to him in their own anti-Sun rants. He's like a kook magnet so he has become an excellent litmus test to identify other kooks.
Sounds a bit like it's shortspeak for mercenary. "OK boys, send in the MRCHs to clear this place out!" Or maybe I've just been playing too much Far Cry...
Money for nothing, pix for free
>They made Java...., But IBM, Oracle and others have created thier own JDK's that are Java 1.4.x complinant as well.
This is a red herring. It doesn't cost anything to get a JVM from Sun. Sun has never been in a position to force Java developers to buy their JVM. They're still in the phase of desperately trying to keep developers interested.
IBM and Oracle have to pay Sun for the license to use the JVM source code. They aren't stealing some sort of cash cow JVM-selling business away from Sun.
So, no, you can't get it cheaper from IBM than Sun, but you did say "what does sun sell" so this doesn't apply anyway (they aren't selling it; they're giving it away).
Sun's biggest problem is that their CPU cores just don't provide the raw power that other vendors do, but their price isn't that much lower.
The base costs of SMP, hardware raid, hot-swap power supplies, etc. doesn't vary much from one vendor to the next for manufacturing costs. This prevents Sun from giving the kind of discounts that customers expect for the CPU performance lag, so they consider moving to other vendors.
Add in products like Oracle which have per-CPU license fees, and it makes less and less sense to buy another Sun box instead of, say, an IBM system that ends up delivering a lower final $/TPx cost for the data center. When your applications don't run on the RDBMS server, the migration is relatively painless and doesn't require any changes on the client other than pointing to a different database instance.
It's almost as bad for application servers where the customer has the source for their enterprise appliations. If it's been properly coded, it is trivial to migrate a typical business application from one vendor to another, except for the regression testing costs.
Sun has always been expensive, but they gained market because they originally ran BSD. Universities ran BSD. Therefore the new grads knew BSD, and had probably even worked on a Sun. Why do you think Microsoft gives such deep discounts to get into a university? They don't care about the cost, they care about the mindshare, and that's what Sun has really lost.
In a world of almost complete standardization of core *nix services behind POSIX APIs, the vendors are forced to compete on price/performance, and Sun's current hardware just doesn't compete.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I might jettison SPARC in favour of AMD, but still build big servers. Concentrate the hardware resources on I/O throughtput, reliability, the backplanes etc, but leave the really expensive bit - making the CPUs - to somebody else.
They'd still be offering the complete server/OS/app/support/PS stack, but without being involved in the CPU money drain.
Sun has had so many half-arsed ideas over the last year or two. IMHO they need to focus a bit more on what they do best. Their hardware's usually very good, and I think Solaris is streets ahead of anything else as a server OS. They just need to stop haemorraging money, and CPU fabbing seems like the thing to drop. It's just too expensive these days.
I found this site again yesterday, and won't hear a bad word said against a company that had this as it's corporate anthem: Power of Sun IT anthem
It also helps them sell more hardware, software and services.
Open Sourcing Java will give IBM a big advantage, and savings and would hurt Sun's revenues. IBM would love to pry Java away from sun so they could kill off a company that is eating into their midrange and mainframe market.
What the OSS community should do is embrace Java more. Java is more established in more places where linux would like to be. Positioning linux as a platform for J2EE deployment of certain sized applications.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
ok, so maybe it was a lame joke
As a sun support person, I'd like to add that you get out of support what you put into it.
We answer tons of questions about the OS and the compilers and so on each and everyday. If you were covered under a contract and had experienced a pattern of non-existent support or answers, you should have provided feedback/complaints to your local office. I can tell you from experience that the squeaky wheel (customer) gets alot of attention. Unless you were expecting "professional services" level info from the break/fix/configure level, which ain't gonna happen.
Sun has traditionally been a platform (OS + Hardware) for hosting large RDBMS database systems. The database systems that were typically hosted on it were Sybase and Oracle and ERP systems such as SAP. These have been systems that are hard to split up. Typically they scale up rather than out. MainFrame systems for example are typically used as database servers. They called their systems "Open" because at the time the majority of hardware and software platforms (IBM, etc) were proprietary and closed.
This market is rapidly shifting and Sun - with its high cost structure seems unable to innovate itself out of a market that is being hit with two disruptive technologies, Linux and scalable X86 processors, and one monopolist, Microsoft, who would like to take the RDBMS market. The current three strongest database vendors are IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft and none of them offer any hope to Sun.
Like DEC before it, Sun is focused on only its best customers and has never made any significant inroads on the low end. Linux and Microsoft are the dual commoditizing stakes that will go through Sun's heart. However, this will be gradual. Large accounting and banking systems run on Sun - and typically Enterprise customers change these systems very slowly.(Check out Clayton Christensen for more)
Sybase
A while ago Sybase was synonymous with Sun systems in the financial industry. Sybase has been loosing market share ever since around 1994, when Microsoft bought a copy of the source code of Sybase SQL Server and then went on its own way. Sybase has recently shifted its focus from the large server to the mobile market.
Oracle is getting its margins killed by Microsoft and IBM. Its fighting back by using parallel servers which allows you to split up its database onto many commodity systems running Linux. Saves money for the customers and there is more potential margin for Oracle. Oracle has moved its "whole business" over to running on Linux on X86 systems.
SAP is another company weary of Microsoft - they have shifted all their development all over to the Linux platform and are promoting it to their customers. Linux typically runs on Intel or AMD systems.
Microsoft is the fastest growing Relational Database vendor (along with MySQL perhaps), eating market share from everyone and with a huge war chest and aggressive licensing packages to force companies to purchase their database system. Microsoft is essentially giving its software away to large companies at $300-$2000 a pop.
IBM's DB2 typically runs on IBM hardware with AIX, OS400, OS390 or more recently Linux as the operating system. No potential sales for Sun here.
Linux - with the 2.6 kernel Linux now has most of the features needed for large scale relational database hosting. Linux already scaled well to 4 CPUs. Now it with the 2.6 kernel it will scale well in the 16-64 CPU range - Sun's bread and butter. Features such as CPU hot swap are available.
Intel - relentlessly seeking higher margins Intel and AMD are scaling up their servers as they gun for the larger profits that the RDBMS hosting business offers.
from my weblog http://xminc.com/mt/
You're pretty out of date. The Sun prices are a lot lower now - check out the V440 for example. Not to mention that on top of that you have a 64bit OS and tonnes of commercial apps. Not everyone's can get aways with Apached and a bit of Samba. And if you need a cheap x86 box - Sun will sell you that too.
RTFM, n00b
Actually, that's only part of it. The other assumption is that Sun is about to be on the flipside of the community because they're thwarting its will, and a reasonable replacement is on its way.
According to Sun, Java pretty much breaks even.
According to Sun. Of course they're going to say that. They can't say it makes them profit, because it clearly doesn't. Admitting that it's a loss would just add blood to the water while there are two big sharks, one white and the other blue, and a whole school of barracuda doing laps around them. Last I checked, Wallstreet wasn't too happy on their recent losses. Even if they do break even, what's to celebrate? The only thing I can think of is the name brand, and they wouldn't lose that either way.
It also helps them sell more hardware, software and services.
I agree. And, they wouldn't lose that either since they are the only ones who own the name.
Open Sourcing Java will give IBM a big advantage, and savings and would hurt Sun's revenues.
IBM is a Java licensee. They can use the name and technology just about anyway Sun can for marketing and production purposes. You can even get certified as a IBM Java programmer, just as you can as a Sun Java programmer. What advantage would it give IBM if the code is GPL/LGPL'd and any changes they make would be available for Sun to incorporate?
IBM would love to pry Java away from sun so they could kill off a company that is eating into their midrange and mainframe market.
If IBM can't kill RedHat (and RedHat is 100% reliant on Linux, and IBM isn't yet), how would IBM kill Sun? Again, this is a misunderstanding that most people have. If Linux's license was BSD, IBM could close their version of the code and make a better version(more accurate to say they could add a selling feature), and gain a minor advantage that could kill off the smaller competition (a few would survive, as some would be able to do something similar as IBM). Of course, I'm describing the Unix Wars of the 80's and 90's. However, the GPL would've made that impossible. Which is why despite being over a decade older (more mature, stable code), and having corporate backing nearly two decades longer(more development and marketing funding), BSD is losing marketshare and mindshare to Linux. The funny thing is that BSD is also Open Source and has been in IT's eyes much longer. What's the differentiating factor? The license. Linux is thriving and growing over BSD and its proprietary variants. The same effect would occur with Java. Now, mind you I'm not claiming the GPL is better than any other license, I'm only stating that if you want a particular effect to occur, this license has proven to be the surest one to cause it.
What the OSS community should do is embrace Java more.
They've done so, and will do so. That is until something similar arrives that is closer to the spirit of what makes them happy. Open Source folks are different from the run of the mill IT folks in that they have a vision of how things should be. Whereas other IT folks are people who don't have a particular vision (at least a unifying one) of how things should be. If history tells us anything, those who are willing to act on their vision, are the ones who write the history books. If Java doesn't allow itself to be embraceable by Open Source folks, but something comes along that does (as did GNU/Linux). Then, I believe that the Open Source folks will write a new chapter in their history.
Java is more established in more places where linux would like to be.
I can tell you from first hand experience in working at a couple of the largest entertainment companies in the world (both in Cali.), that where there was Sun/OS-Solaris or HP/UX or AIX or IRIX, there is now Linux. These companies are Microsoft houses, even as once they wer
is google going to be traded on the nasdaq?
Sun is a Unix vendor. SCO is suing people with any connection to Unix.
You're misinformed. Sun purchased a perpetual Unix license from AT&T back in the day. They are the one and only Unix vendor that would not be affected adversely if SCO won their lawsuits with IBM.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
This is the type of Microsoft-esque mentality that's going to eventually hurt the OSS community. For a group that talks about Freedom so much they sure like to dictate what other people do or say and if they don't lash out against them.
According to Sun. Of course they're going to say that. They can't say it makes them profit, because it clearly doesn't.
Sun is a public company. They can't just easily lie about things like this. I didn't say Sun as a whole is breaking even, I said they said Java pretty much breaks even. Meaning they get enough revenue from Java to pay for their expenses.
IBM is a Java licensee. They can use the name and technology just about anyway Sun can for marketing and production purposes. You can even get certified as a IBM Java programmer, just as you can as a Sun Java programmer. What advantage would it give IBM if the code is GPL/LGPL'd and any changes they make would be available for Sun to incorporate?
Some of the licenses Sun sells will not be valid anymore if Java is GPL'd. One of the main things is certification and testing to be called Java. If it is GPL'd people can choose to call it something other than Java. They don't have to pay Sun anything. Call it WebsphereVM and WebsphereEE and IBM can do anything they want with the language and Sun gets nothing for it. Some of the arguments people are making is that Sun's specifications change too quickly for people to be able to keep up. Two seconds later they say that Sun should release control so that people like IBM can make the changes to the Java that would help them because the process is too slow. What people don't understand is that Sun is maintaining control so that people don't go in and make changes and defeat the whole purpose of having an open standard. Right now it's really nice to be able to develop an application using Tomcat and know that it should deploy on other application servers that conform to that specification.
As far as the speed goes. Keep in mind. Many corporate J2EE/Java users don't migrate to the new specifications and implementations right away. They have a lot of applications written to a previous spec and take time to thoroughly test their apps before deploying a new version. Many people are at least 1 spec version behind. Standardizing on a platform is usually a long process in the corporate world. The point is, developing an OSS version to a previous spec isn't that bad a thing.
If IBM can't kill RedHat (and RedHat is 100% reliant on Linux, and IBM isn't yet), how would IBM kill Sun?
Why would IBM want to kill RedHat? RedHat didn't steal major sales away from IBM. They helped them sell hardware. IBM puts RedHat on it's mainframes, on it's powerpc boxes, on it's as400 boxes, on it's intel boxes. Sun's servers eat into IBM's powerpc boxes, as400 boxes and mainframe business. The comparison you make isn't valid. AIX had already lost in most cases to Solaris.
BSD is losing marketshare and mindshare to Linux. The funny thing is that BSD is also Open Source and has been in IT's eyes much longer. What's the differentiating factor? The license.
I agree that it's the license that makes the difference but probably not in the same way you think it does. The BSD license and BSD development is (maybe was) very apolitical. There wasn't much of an agenda other than to create a very good, free version of Unix. A lot of commercial Unix code comes from BSD as do other OS's including the Linux Kernel. The difference between the licensing that makes one more popular is that the GPL is very political and has other agendas. Not everyone can code new enhancements but everyone can mouth off for a cause. It's not so much a better product that m
Open Source Java DAO Generator
There is no way that Sun wil fold anytime soon. Having an inside look at the company, I honestly don't think that anything will happen to them soon. There is new technology that they are beginning to harvest, and they are doing good things. My advise: keep watching them.
You mean like this?
= 9J =
OTOH, workstations need reliable video, not the latest buggy as hell nVidia shite, so I don't entirely agree with the grandparent comment.
I have to admit, I don't understand what you mean by "Microsoft-esque". Please elaborate.
For a group that talks about Freedom so much they sure like to dictate what other people do or say
One reason why Freedom is so great is because you can tell people who supposedly care about your opinions what to do. They don't have to do it, which is the other reason why Freedom is so great. However, you also don't have to continue your relationship if its not going your way. Anyone who continues doing so is either a sycophant, or a stooge.
and if they don't lash out against them.
How is making choices and choosing tools lashing out? At the very least, it shows concern for the relationship when an unhappiness is communicated from one party to the other. If it falls on deaf ears, is that the complainant's fault? At least an attempt was made, and often in plenty of time to fix the problem. It would be hypocritical to their own ideals for Open Source proponents to continue to lock their code using a proprietary language/platform when a reasonable alternative matures to the point of practical use.
It's typical of corporate pushers to limit freedom of choice (unprofitable otherwise) and bemoan the situation when one appears, whether by design or by nature, with the potential to be more attractive and closer to the hearts of those they've up to that point held sway over.
Some of the licenses Sun sells will not be valid anymore if Java is GPL'd.
Not true. If people/corporations want Java, they'll use products that are called Java. Very much like if people/corporations want Linux, they'll use products that are called Linux. Anyone who doesn't deal with the owner of the Java name and trademark will have to sell and train people in a product they can't name as everyone else knows it. It's an uphill battle. Find me a corporation that will use a Linux OS that isn't called Linux. You can't do it.
One of the main things is certification and testing to be called Java. If it is GPL'd people can choose to call it something other than Java. They don't have to pay Sun anything. Call it WebsphereVM and WebsphereEE and IBM can do anything they want with the language and Sun gets nothing for it.
If IBM were to try to sell something perceived to be outside an established standard, all that would happen is that every competing vendor would use that as part of their advertising campaign. You can imagine where IBM's mindshare would go regarding a product they couldn't even name as everyone else knows it. Specially considering there are and will be free alternatives that are certified under the JCP. It'll never happen (actually it did with J2EE, but once everyone else [JBoss] was published to follow the standard, all vendors, including IBM, scrambled to match the reference standard).
Think about C or C++, which wasn't under any license, just a late-to-market standard. When competing vendors developed their tools, did they call it Visual D? Or, Visual Age for E? No, they called it C because misrepresenting the product would've been a waste of marketing/training effort and money. And, the competition would've creamed them. No one would buy it. If IBM decided to go on their own, and skip calling it Java (because Sun owns the name/trademark), they couldn't even claim Java compatibility.
Come to think of it, this also actually happened with Java prior to J2EE. It was earlier in its life when the specs were published and it was the new kid on the block. HP decided they were going to make their own cleanroom implementation and simply not bother with licensing the name or getting it certified. Guess what? Nobody came to the party. They eventually relented and got a Sun license. If Java were GPL'd, it would simply be cheaper to work with Sun and the JCP
Email is mostly reliable in the sense that if the message fails to deliver, you should eventually get a bounce telling you why. Those links were complaining about:
The grandparent was talking about the search engine having 1-2% losses. In email, this would be messages silently dropped, not a bounce. People wouldn't stand for that kind of reliability problems. Either gmail is more reliable than this (and thus, their distributed system can be reliable when it needs to be) or a lot of people will be complaining about gmail soon.
To summarize: I won't disagree with you that email is not reliable enough for certain applications, but it's certainly more reliable than they said the search engine is. Thus, their implementing an email system on the same distributed system indicates to me that the distributed system is reliable.