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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?"
yeah fold NOW
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
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."
Now, I'm going to watch the presentation on Croquet.
"Macs have all the downsides of Suns (proprietary, single-vendor, not-Intel), and none of upsides (scalability, software base)."
Uh...yeah....
Someone hasn't heard of the.Terascale Computing Facility. If that's not Scale, I don't know what is.
Also, I kinda have to wonder if what you listed as downsides really matter. In high end computing, people just want the stuff to work. Intel/AMD or Apple(IBM-Moto)/Sun. Are you really gaining any more or less choice? Do corporate customers really care?
This is just false.Well part of it.
There top of the line workstation is the Tezro, a quad processor 800mhz MIPS proc system, as far as a 'desktop' is concerned.
Then there is the Onyx4 Ultimate Vision , used heavily by high end post production houses for 4k Digital Intermediate work, as well as research and gov'ment agencies.
The part of them dumping most of their bldgs in Mtn. View. well yea..
thanks to piss-poor-mgmt....
There is a reason for including these utilities. Sun prides itself on maintaining backward compatability with pretty much everything written for its OS back to say Solaris 2.6. If they kept changing the utilities, scripts that leverege these utilities would break. This is a HUGE deal for companies that run legacy apps.
Yeah, the Solaris tar does suck, but on my JumpStart server, I ALWAYS include the GNU versions of tar, gzip etc.
If you want the latest-greatest, load the GNU utilities from the Solaris Supplemental CD. Or download them from www.sunfreeware.com. Or compile them yourself. Or install them via RPM. Sheesh.
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
McNealy would rather choke than see a Ultrasparc run Windows, but he would rather see an Ultrasparc run Windows than see his company die at the hands of Linux, a piece of software created by many of his own customers (former at least).
Huh. That's funny. Because last I checked, Ultrasparcs can't run windows, but Sun is selling a linux distribution... ohh, but the linux distribution doesn't run on the UltraSPARCs. I get it now.
Looks pretty Open & Free stuff to me.
including a licence that's FSF and OSI approved
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
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.
"Why does everyone want to kill these shrinking companies instead of letting them carve their own niche?"
Because they can't gracefully shrink the company down to a size that is consistent with being a niche player. Getting rid of the people is tough enough, but then you have all kinds of capital investment and leases that won't just go away.
Given the choice, almost any CEO and BoD would rather sell out than shrink 90% and try for a niche market. During DEC's decline, they were furiously spinning off divisions to make the company more acceptable to Compaq. Ultimately, Compaq paid something like $9B for a company that was mostly just a name and some nifty CPU technology. The opportunity to sieze the market and kick Intel's ass had long since come and gone. The DEC acquisition will be remembered as one of the worst deals ever. The resulting debt nearly sank Compaq, and is now HP's problem. The people running DEC at the time knew exactly what they were doing. Having blown the opportunity to rule the computing world, they settled for a deal that effectively cashed out their investment. They performed their primary function of "maximizing shareholder value".
Nobody wanted to buy Apple, so they were left to either die or re-emerge as a niche player. Apple never made chips or most of their hardware, therefore they did not have much capital tied up in manufacturing. That helped alot.
I doubt anyone will buy Sun. Unlike Apple, they have a huge investment in chips and manufacturing, so whatever they do has to amortize the debt. Everyone remembers how the DEC deal worked for Compaq, and nobody will want to repeat the experience.
I have no idea what Sun will do. Like everything else, the companies that once made fine products are being squeezed out of the market by commodity players.
Seeing the back of the window allows you to access more real estate for notes and such.
For instance, I've used it (which means I'm a Sun employee and hence I'm staying anonymous) to attache a sticky note to a program my wife kept forgetting how to reconfigure. She needs a reminder, she just flips the window around and doesn't need to ask me for the Nth time.
I kind of enjoy having a way to attach notes to windows rather than having them float around the desktop.
Besides, the version that everyone is seeing demo'ed now is Karahawa's first iteration when he was working on his own. The group he is with now is completely rewriting it based on feedback so who knows where it will go in the end?
I'll wager this sort of eye-for-an-eye, zero sum logic is endemic to human thinking altogether.
Human history is chock-full of one culture declaring another ( largely similar ) culture to be at odds with their god/economics/what-have-you and proceeding to at least try to wipe the other out.
Think: crusades. Think: cold-war. Think: carthago delenda est.
The zero-sum is not exactly new. The difference is now we're dealing as much with corporate entities as with foreign cultures.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Their customer support sucks. I say let Sun evaporite in a wave of Hawking radiation.
Just a back up to the pp.
Apple doesn't scale because you can't put a large number of chips in the same box. x86 isn't as limited, but it's not great either.
As you add processors, there is a diminishing return on inverstment with each one. iow, two uniprocessor boxes will be able to do more work than one dual box, however they cannot operate on the same data at the same time (I know beowulf, etc. give me a break). In some cases, one box with n chips will outperform a box with n+1 chips.
On Sun hardware, this difference is less than on apple and x86 hardware.
Sun's architecture is designed from the ground up to have a bunch of processors in the same box. This is part of the reason that their uni boxen are unimpressive performance wise. Scalability sometimes hurts small scale performance(Think using Oracle/MySQL/PGSQL for a table with 100 rows. Sorting and binary search would be faster).
Have you ever read through Sun's FE Handbook? It's a nightmare. Ever tried to hot-swap hardware inside a production Sun server while it's online and in use? Bah. Give me a room full of Linux PCs any day!
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.
Ok, so let's compare. Let's compare a Sun Fire V440 and a HP DL580 G2. Let's assume each is equipped with 4 top end CPU's, 8GB memory, dual Gigabit NIC's, 2x36GB disks, and a DVD-ROM drive on each -- sounds like a fairly standard server configuration to me.
Price
The V440 is more than 50% less!!!!!!!!! Ok, let's go to performance. Going to use the SPEC CPU2000 info for the DL580 G2 3.0GHz Xeons and going to use the Sun Fire V250 config mutltiple by 1.8 (since Sun has not yet releaed info on the 4-way V440 with the same 1.28GHz US IIIi CPU's tha the V250 has). (Listing below represents Cint2000/Cfp2000/Cint2000 rate/Cfp2000 rate).
Performance
Hmmmmm....two things jump out at me here -- the UltraSPARC IIIi is lousy at integer math, while the Xeon is lousy at floating point math. Either way, the 3.0GHz Xeon, which represents a clock speed difference of 234% greater than the US IIIi, only performs better than it by 28.7%. Increasing the CPU to 1.7GHz or going to US IV CPU's as Sun plans to do with the upcoming V490 will close the gap.
So overall, for 109.6% of the price of a V440, you're only getting 28.7% of the performance. Umm....what was your original point?
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Dude. We had two E10Ks and had to swap out *all* the processors (e-cache problem). Now we have two
F15s. Got'em just last fall and we've already had to swap out *ALL* the CPUs. Again. Even a microsoft user could see the pattern.
Last week a stick of memory failed and crashed the whole stinking domain.
Reliability? I think not, and I'm (sort of) a fan of Sun.
I don't think Sun will be around in the long term for any of a number of reasons.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I work at a government installation and want to pass on some of what is happening here.
In one of the labs here they had a very large Sun system along with a cluster of suns happily working away. That was then. Now the sun systems are gone and in their place is a large Linux cluster of 20 PCs. One of them died recently. They shut the system down, turned off the power, pulled out the unit, took out the motherboard, put in the new motherboard, reconnected everything, and brought it all back up. Took a couple of hours (including all of the tests they did to make sure everything was ok). Under the old system, everything would probably have been down for a day. This is because they would have to call Sun, arrange for someone to come out, let them do the work, and then go on. The time and money saved is tremendous.
In another lab, they had an SGI monster machine. Those people looked around, saw what was going on , and took the hint. The monster machine is being dismantled and they now have two Linux clusters which handle everything.
From a monetary point of view: For what it costs in service contracts you can purchase hundreds of PCs, the stands to hold them, and additional motherboards, hard drives, and anything else you may need. Usually for less than what it costs for a single Sun or SGI. (SGI's service contracts were for 1/3 the price of each unit. So a $50,000.00 unit cost you $15,000.00 a year. In our lab we had 30 units each costing over $150,000.00. So we were paying $45,000.00 per unit or $1,350,000.00 a year in service contracts.) Now we pay $20,000.00 a year in service contracts [for two special PCs] and upgrade the computers as needed by just doing mail orders for the parts. That is a savings of $1,200,000.00 a year. Which is also our biggest gripe. If we are saving this much money - how come we are still so tight for cash? Where did it all go to?
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
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.