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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.
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
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
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.
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
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
Thats good, lets not make java better than .net but let the courts decide. I love how everyone is against lawsuits and the government mendling in things until its apple,sun or whoever on the suing side.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
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 */
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
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.
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
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.
Yes they have some type of "arrangement" with Microsoft and no doubt about it Microsoft has punch. The problem in my mind though is that Microsoft tends to eat their allies in time.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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.
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.
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.
That's precisely why the last two versions of Solaris (and possibly farther back) have included the GNU utilities -- so people who prefer them can install them easily. However, if you have apps you need to support that were made to work with the Solaris versions of these utilities (perhaps because they pre-date the GNU software), you can use the stock stuff and your apps won't break.
Sun's SSH on Solaris 9 is also a Sun-maintained version of OpenSSH. Last year, Solaris 9 was the current version, and patching SSH was as easy as downloading the patch package and installing it -- not any tougher than Linux.
It seems to me you're asking Sun to fix problems they've already fixed, some a very, very long time ago.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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."
Actually, they do. Sun just certified one of their x86 servers with Windows
, and announced plans to certify ALL of their x86/Opteron hardware to work with Windows.
IMHO this could be the thing that saves Sun, because one reason many people stick with Sun is the quality of Sun support, which has always been some of the best technical support available. Now you can buy your Windows/Linux/UNIX hardware from one vendor, and know that you will get great support with a fast turn-around, and not end up on the phone talking to Apu in Bangalore.
Of course, given that some companies are opting to just make all of the x86 hardware disposable due to low per-unit costs, this might be a moot point. But then again, when a strange problem pops up in every machine in your 1,000 system cluster, you probably don't want to be dealing with a vendor who has cruddy support services.
(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.
That is like saying "because Ferrari isn't prepared to build economy cars, they suffer". I don't agree at all. In Sun's case, the market they sit on has completely turned around. There are no longer hoardes of energetic .coms with millions worth of VC burning holes in their pockets to spend on top of the line hardware and software.
In Ferrari's case, there are still many many people around the world with enough money to spend on supercars such as the ones they produce, so I don't for one second see how you can compare the two.
If the sports/super car market were to nose dive as dramatically as the IT industry has, then yes, Ferrari would suffer as they would no longer have a market, and we probably wouldn't see sub 50k hatchbacks and MPVs coming out of Modena in a million blue moons.
I think this is the key issue here - the market has reversed polarity completely regarding IT purchasing, and Sun needs to adapt faster (their x86 roadmap is the right direction) or die a slow death.
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.
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.
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 =
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.
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.
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.
Close, but you are wrong on one point. The fact that Sun systems *can* hold tons of RAM is the only reason that Solaris/SPARC is still in the EDA game. Once Opteron/RHEL3 based systems that address 32+ GB of RAM are shipping in volume, I can't see a single chip design house opting for a Sun proprietary system except for legacy support.
And now that major vendors are offering Linux versions of their design tools, we are no longer tied to Solaris.
I can second this. I work as a chip designer, and we used to be locked to either Sun or HP boxes, because thats all that Cadence and Mentor used to support. Now that they have ported their apps to Linux we are not locked to hardware any more (thankfully). We used to have Ultra60s on everyone's desk, but those are dogs compared to current AMD and Intel machines (for chip design at least). The writing has been on the wall for a couple years now - you don't need expensive proprietary Unix boxes for these types of apps anymore.
Bear in mind that they have had 2 2:1 splits since 2000, meaning if you owned 1 share in 1999, you now own 4. Translated, their actual total value of ownership is roughly equal today what it was in late 1999, which is a lot more than most companies can say. How many companies do you know that can claim their shareholders have not lost any money in the last four years?
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
I'm very surprised to read that. I've had nothing but good experiences with Sun's hardware and software support over the seven or eight years I've been using them.