Sun Microsystems, a CEO's Last Stand?

pillageplunder writes "Businessweek's cover article is a sharp look at Sun Microsystems. The gist of the article? That its fall can be laid at the Feet of its CEO, Scott McNealy. Overall, a balanced read, one that does a good recap of the the high and the very low low's that Sun has reached under McNealy."

Comments

How do I apply for his position?

[Kjuib]

can I just email my resume to HR@sun.com? or should I walk in and say I want the job?

Re:How do I apply for his position?

[Anonymous Coward]

can I just email my resume to HR@sun.com? or should I walk in and say I want the job?

no, Darl McBride is next in line...

Again?

[bconway]

This is starting to get as funny as "This is the year of Linux on the desktop," but while we get those articles once a year, we get Sun-is-dying articles on a monthly basis. It isn't going to happen anytime in the near future guys, no matter how many times you write articles that lack any supporting information in the hopes of someone viewing your BusinessWeek site.

Re:Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anti-Sun articles have been going on for, lets see... 21 years now. Pro-Linux aritcles have been going on for... 13 years.

Brave Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

and the very low low's that Sun has reached under McNealy.

I certainly wouldn't want to reach under McNealy, especially near his low lows.

Re:Brave Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I would... that man is HOT.

Re:Brave Sun

[spells]

Hi Mr. McNealy,
How is your world today ;)

Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[GGardner]

At the various conferences and other tech events I go to, I've met many Sun and Microsoft employees. One thing that really strikes me is that I've yet to meet a Sun employee younger than about 35, but I've also never met a Microsoft employee (other than an executive) over 35. I think this creates problems for both companies.

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yes, you really do need a mix, and I think the tech world as a whole is starting to realize it. (I can't speak for whether Microsoft or Sun has done so, of course.) Experience and energy both count; you get the best results when you have both.

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Anonymous Coward]

/me waves ... 33 and been at Sun for 4 years. Of course, I was aquired, not hired, and most of the people my age who were aquired have been fired ("RIF'ed").

There are a number of Sun engineering offices that have a majority age under 35, but alot of those are overseas so you won't meet them. The offices in California and the Sales offices definitely are of an older average age.

As for the article ... it was spot-on. Alot of us down in the lower ranks have been saying the same things that the execs quoted in the article said. And most of us knew that McNealy was the one dodging the issues (sorry, holding steady). Personally I won't be too surprised, if Sun keeps the current stock trend, to see a company like IBM buy Sun out and strip out everything but R&D. We're good at R&D, but we've lost touch with the market.

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[IOOOOOI]

I too have some first hand experience comparing M$ and Sun.

Whenever a M$ sales team comes-a-knocking, its always 3 or 4 pushy guys.

Whenever Sun calls, its a smoking hot sales chick (to weaken your resolve) and a grandfatherly guy who actually knows his shit (to instill confidence).

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[El Gringo Loco]

>Whenever Sun calls, its a smoking hot sales chick (to weaken your resolve) and a grandfatherly guy who actually knows his shit (to instill confidence). They use the same tactic with us. It makes me always look forward to Sun sales calls ;)

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[drooling-dog]

Experience and energy both count; you get the best results when you have both.

In some ways, energy slowly gets killed by experience, rather than being the result of age per se. In my 20s, technology was cool and I was thrilled with what I found myself increasingly able to do (and with what I was entrusted to do). That made 12 and 14 hour days zip by like nothing, and the occasional all-nighter seemed fun. Now, in my 40s, I can do just about everything more efficiently and with fewer false starts, but the "cool" aspect has diminished and motivation for extraordinary effort has to be found somewhere else...

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that really strikes me is that I've yet to meet a Sun employee younger than about 35, but I've also never met a Microsoft employee (other than an executive) over 35. I think

I was all set to blast you, then got to actually thinking about my 2 years at Sun's Broomfield campus - you're basically right. At 31, I was one of the youngest guys there, and probably the youngest in my department. There's a lot of experience there, but that can be a two edged sword when you're not bringing outside (read fresh) ideas in. Compound that with the fact that most people I worked with came from the defense industry and while we did some cool things, innovation was not one of them.

It was a cool company to work for, but nothing challenging. I kind of feel like I wasted 2 years by choosing to work for Sun over my Nth startup.

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Daniel Dvorkin]

True enough; I started programming a bit later than a lot of the folks here on /. (late 20's, in my mid 30's now) and I've seen people both older and younger than me follow the same path of "oh wow, this is cool" --> "yeah, it's a job" --> burnout. I'm not burned out yet, but I can feel it starting to happen, and it's probably a good thing that I'm going to be getting a PhD in another field and hopefully find an academic/research position which, while it may require me to do some programming, won't be the run-of-the-mill DBA work I do now.

But there really is a certain amount of energy -- for everything, not just marathon coding sessions -- that youth brings to the table, and some of it is purely as function of age. All other things being equal, a 25 y/o with five years of experience is going to be much more energetic than a 40 y/o with the same experience. Young people also really do tend to have more imagination than their elders, and are more likely to see a novel way of solving a problem that their older counterparts would just never think of.

On the other side of the coin, you get programmers like my father, who has been doing it since the mid-Sixties, and has worked on a wide variety of both business and technical problems in just about every industry you can name. He flat-out refuses to do the marathons -- hell, he's earned it -- but then, he doesn't have a reason for them; he's seen it all, doesn't ever have to reinvent the wheel, and is at least as productive in 8 hours as a twentysomething whiz kid is in 12. (I consider myself squarely between the two extremes, obviously.) But he does like working with younger programmers who keep him sharp.

Like I said, a mix works best. I'm currently the project lead for a group ranging in age from 18 to 44, so I have a pretty good idea of how this works ...

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Anonymous Coward]

I've yet to meet a Sun employee younger than about 35

Hmmh. You haven't talked to the software development guys then. There certainly are old-timers in kernel and support groups -- and they are VERY useful to have due to their experience -- but in my group, I think oldest developer may be at 35. Most others are within few years of 30 (both sides).

I do agree that diverse employee base is an asset; whether it's heterogenous age, sex, background or even nationality, and that having "only old geezers" or "young chicken" may be a problem. But I don't think that overall Sun's employees are at the older end. In fact, WRT business analysts (bleech) it would be good to have more people with some age and experience, instead of recent MBA graduates they seem to be.

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[f0rt0r]

I disagree. It has more to do with trying new technologies/methods than with age. I am mid-30's and have found that changing jobs keeps me excited and full of energy. I basically started with analog electronics, then switched to digital, then I worked with mainframe systems, then with pc hardware, then with pc software, then focused on networking ( Banyan Vines, Windows, etc ), then network administration, and now most recently I am doing web development and perl scripting. A perk is a finally working in an mixed Unix/Linux/Windows environment, which to me is a big plus as I get to learn how to integrate these various platforms.
My stint as Windows 2000/XP Network Administrator lasted 4 years and was really burned out from solving the same problems doing the same tasks all the time. I was losing energy, and when I realized that I knew it was time to get out of the rut and do something different.
To sum it up, once you can do your job in your sleep, it will put you to sleep, so then it is time to change jobs for something that will be a challenge.
Btw, at my new position people always comment on how I come up with innovative ways to solve various problems, some of that is just because I am "new blood" and some of it is because I find the new job very interesting and it really motivates me think hard about how to solve a problem.

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Transfan76]

I'm under 35 and I work at Sun. I have been there for over 3 years now. In another 3 years I'll still be under 35, can't say I'll be at Sun though :)

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Anonymous Coward]

We're good at R&D

Not lately. NeWS was brilliant, Java is a turd.

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not wrong! I work at Sun PS (UNIX tech) and my project engagement officer is this hot chick in a tight red dress. All the UNIX techs have beards and most of them are over 40, to give that air of wisdom. Techs without beards are "encouraged" to grow beards. It's not an official policy, but the rest of the techs give us gentle ribbings like "you can't know UNIX until you have a beard" so we end up growing one.

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Anonymous Coward]

shoot the MSFT guys and do the world a favor.

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Klanglor]

Hehe, a young geekie Asian guy with glasses has the same effect than a over 40 with beard.

Re:Sun employees vs Microsoft employees

[Keeper]

The median age of a Microsoft employee in 2000 was 34.

Classical big-company problem

[Bruce Perens]

Sun is stuck in making a transition from high-margin products to low-margin ones. Their workstations had 70% margins in their heyday. Linux and MS Windows have eaten that market - 5 years later than people outside of Sun thought it would happen, but it happened. But Sun can't make the transition to low-margin products without damaging the remainder of their high-margin ones, and they can't accept that. So, expect them to behave as if their low-margin products are directed at the high-margin products of other companies while simultaneously attempting to protect their own high-margin products from their own low-margin ones. The result is that they will exhibit a sort of corporate multiple-personality disorder, something evident with Sun for several years.

Bruce

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Enquest]

The era of the big IT company may well be at an ending due Free & open source. I think the company's will be the one's like Mandrake!

Re:Classical big-company problem

[calidoscope]

The "reason" that was usually given for Sun's demise from the Wintel onslaught was the Itanic -er- Itanium. Funny how we haven't heard much from the Biz rags about that fiasco.

Along those lines, I'd say that Sun has done much better than HewPaq in the Unix system market.

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Bruce Perens]

If anyone's demise is fed by Itanic, it would be Intel's and HP's. Itanium failure is driven by price-performance. Intel is going to have to make a higher performance version, and then sell it at a loss for a few years as well as aggressively court motherboard manufacturers to make affordable Itanium systems, if they want to get market share.

Bruce

Re:Classical big-company problem

[scoove]

Sun can't make the transition to low-margin products without damaging the remainder of their high-margin ones

Clayton Christensen has got to be mildly amused at Sun's disposition (and probably wondering why McNealy didn't fork out the $12 bucks to buy his rather significant book).

This is classic high-margin "focusing and developing your product line's evolution on your top 5% customers" as well as a clear non-response to Clayton's "trivial technology" via Sun's insistence that Linux could not do what Solaris does.

In the mid-90s, I began predicting Sun's demise when we encountered their Netra Internet "server" fiasco. Sun took a Sparc5, completely crippled its OS, removed its video card (serial or network interface - progressive, eh?), and then made misrepresentations as to what software was included. For instance, it was billed as a web server - but in actuality, it had a FTP server and a copy of Mosaic client software for download. Wala... it was "serving up web software."

Having bought several dozens of these based on Sun's misrepresentations, the only salvation was to buy video cards, full Solaris licenses (with a C compiler which was also excluded from the Netra) and make them a Sparc5 once again (at well over the cost of simply purchasing a Sparc5). Not only was the Sun product manager's response mystifying (blaming the customer for having unique and special needs - what, running http as falsely advertised?), but even more amusing was that no Sun support group had any awareness of this product.

More revealing, however, was that Netra was a stillborne attempt to enter lower margin (ala 40%?) products without threatening the cash cow. It failed miserably and I would expect some of the behind-the-scenes politics might explain why support knew nothing of the product and why it was permitted to leave Sun crippled to the point of unusability. Shortly after my public criticism, it was pulled.

I encountered similar high-marginosis several years later when Sun was pushed as a required platform for numerous Lucent products. The gifted Linux and FreeBSD work of an company employee allowed several thousand dollars worth of Intel hardware to replace quarter-million dollar Sun servers.

As Bruce writes, I'd suggest Sun's high-margin cash-cow myopia goes back well into the early 90s, when according to Clayton's theory, the time to respond to Linux and *BSD was immediate. It'd be interesting if others have Sun experiences, especially with respect to any lower-margin product introductions/failures, that might further illustrate Sun's trouble.

*scoove*

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The era of the big IT company may well be at an ending due Free & open source. I think the company's will be the one's like Mandrake!

It doesn't appear that F/LOSS is hurting the biggest IT company at all.

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Wala...

Sorry, I can't read any further; all breakers tripped. "Voilà." It's from the French, idiomatically used to express triumph and delight; it translates roughly into "see here!" "Wala," on the other hand, is, well, it's... it's just pathetic. "Wala." I mean, come ON. How can you get to the age where you can manipulate a computer, and even write seven internally consistent paragraphs (your conclusions are another thing, but this is a spelling flame; let's not get too off-track), with a link to a real book and everything, that you even appear to have read, and still we get: "Wala."

Here, let's at least make it a little more dramatic: "wa-LA!" Now I feel a sense of the theater; the magician has just performed his best trick. Pity it was a with a deck of TV Magic(TM) Cards, but what did you expect? The guy said "Wala" instead of "Voilà!"

Wala. You don't happen to use "formally" instead of "formerly" too, such as in, "I formally had credibility, but then I used 'wala' instead of 'voilà'"? That one drives me nuts, too.

Wala.

Re:Classical big-company problem

[reynhout]

eh?

I loved the Netras. They were exactly the right product.

What is the value of a video card on a webserver? Or a floppy drive? Or even a CD-ROM, though I would usually end up ordering them, for the additional $135.

Would you really have run the Sun-supplied httpd under any circumstances?? At the time, they were always shipping versions that were seriously outdated. They shipped sendmail4 for YEARS after sendmail8 was out! (This I never understood.)

I bought hundreds of Netras (literally, for a dozen different clients). They were a great way to build a cheap presentation layer for a web farm.

The standard pair of network interfaces was nice too (and rare among HW vendors, at the time). It saved $800 for a quad card.

Yes, they were IDE and there was no MBus. That didn't bother me at all. I used them where there were already good design reasons for system redundancy, either for failover or scaling.

So obviously, the Netras fit my needs perfectly and not yours. For those who weren't around at the time, Linux was *not* a viable option for a large production web farm at the time. It definitely *is* now, and IMHO that's why Sun is so devalued.

Solaris is still superior to Linux in many ways, but Linux is just as good or better for the vast majority of the market. If they were priced equally (TCO- admins, hardware, and software combined), Solaris would still be holding on. They aren't. It isn't.

I still own a bunch of Sun stock that I'm unwilling to sell at this deep of a loss. Come on Scott, make me proud of my stubbornness. Steve did! :-)

Re:Classical big-company problem

[davecb]

Bruce Perens wrote: Sun is stuck in making a transition from high-margin products to low-margin ones

I think that's true in the low-end-product space, but that isn't where Sun is making money or where they're putting their effort. The part of the business that was most successful was servers, initially just retargeted workstations and small multiprocessors, and eventually medium and large multiprocessors.

The opportunity in the server space is to significantly lower the cost per unit work, something which I expect the whole industry to be doing in a few years.

Right now, Sun and IBM have their first dual-core chipsets out, in small quantities and starting with the medium-to-large server markets. The big cost reduction will be when they, (and AMD, and probably SGI), have 8- and 16-way multithreaded chips out. These deal with the huge mismatch between CPU and memory speed, and will be able to saturate a modern memory bus by running enough threads to keep the ALUs earning their keep even when individual threads are blocked waiting on a fetch.

At that time, we'll see something like a 10:1 or perhaps 30:1 jump in price-performance. Which, I claim, is A Good Thing (;-))

This, in turn, means the competition will be once again in the server market, where the middle and large ends are both high-margin, and a significant jump in price-perfromance will justify the margins.

I do eventually expect to see low-end multi-threaded chips, probably in blade or 1U enclosures, for a relatively high price per unit but with a very high price-performance offsetting that.

--dave

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Bruce Perens]

I would propose as the cardinal sin of the computer industry: protecting your own higher-priced or older products from your own newer, lower-priced products. This was a primary contributor to DEC's demise. When the VAX 750 came out, it really could have been as fast as a 780. For a while there was an aftermarket kit to un-cripple it so that it would indeed have performance close to a 780. But having a much cheaper machine of similar performance available would have hurt those high-margin 780 sales, and worse, would make the people who had just caused their companies to buy big-ticket 780's to look stupid or even lose their jobs.

But nobody made Sun protect DEC's lines. So, Sun won. Sun seems to have forgotten that lesson.

Bruce

Re:Classical big-company problem

[calidoscope]

If anyone's demise is fed by Itanic, it would be Intel's and HP's.

No argument from me wrt to intel and HP. It will be interesting to see if BizWeek has anything to say about that.

My point was that Windows on the Itanic was thought by many in the mid-90's to be the future of workstations - thus making Sun irrelevant. Sun was the first major OEM to pull out of the Itanic bandwagon - much to intel's disgust.

Intel's other major boo-boo was trying to push single processor performance too far. With processor speeds now being dominated by interconnect delays, the "smart money" is designing smaller cores and putting more on a chip.

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this right: you wanted machines that had heads (read: desktops) for development but you bought headless servers instead... and this is magically Sun's fault?

Of course you were an unhappy customer! You bought the wrong kit!

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Anonymous Coward]

"Solaris is still superior to Linux in many ways, but Linux is just as good or better for the vast majority of the market. If they were priced equally (TCO- admins, hardware, and software combined), Solaris would still be holding on. They aren't. It isn't."

Eh? Have you actualy priced Solaris vs. Linux? If you want to get a supported distro (which you *need* if you're running something like Oracle, otherwise you can't get their support), Solaris actually costs out cheaper. And TCO is generally in Solaris' favor, too. In fact, if you get an un-supported distro, TCO probably tips immediately over to Solaris.

I expect to get a lot of pushback on the last -- "but I download Linux and it magically works on my iron for my app!" It's not been my experience, nor has it been the experience of much of anyone in the real world I've talked to. Much hand-holding, tinkering, downloading, recompiling required. When was the last time I had to recompile a Sun kernel to get something to work? 1992?

Re:Classical big-company problem

[legLess]

Nice to see that Technocrat is back, Bruce.

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Piquan]

I would propose as the cardinal sin of the computer industry: protecting your own higher-priced or older products from your own newer, lower-priced products. This was a primary contributor to DEC's demise.

How would you compare this to when they dropped the PDP-10 for the VAX?

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Having bought several dozens of these

it sounds almost like you were someone who bought lots of stuff based on what you thought you knew about a product line based on past experience and suddenly found yourself faced with having to explain to superiors that you fucked up, and therefore decided to blame the vendor for changing the rules on you and therefore "it's their fault, those bastards".

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Bozdune]

I would second that analysis. The problem is a deeper one, though -- the focus of American (public) companies on quarterly profits. God help the DEC executive who had let those numbers slip while trying to build a new business on, say, PC's, a market that DEC approached half-heartedly to say the least. Instead, they clung to their VAXes, kept Wall Street happy, and the Alpha was too late to save them.

The other phenomenon is that big companies get very badly bloated with wacky little sub-units that seem to just bumble on and on without purpose. Groups existed within DEC that, logically, should have long since been disbanded. Why was DEC still making disk drives and tape drives? How come the VT100 terminal group was still busy producing new firmware for a dying technology? How come getting UNIX to run on the VAX was like pulling teeth, you had to go to third parties to get a decent networked version? What the hell was going on? (And you VMS lovers can kiss my ass. Where's VMS now? Right. So shut up.)

One of the problems is that when you make your own stuff, you tend to hide all kinds of ugliness in overhead numbers, and you get sloppy over time. I don't have any basis for this speculation, but I'll bet that Sun's manufacturing cost was WAY under DEC's. DEC got fat and happy early, and paid the price. Sun got fat and happy during the boom, and now they're paying the price.

I walked into a company in February 2001 and ripped out every single Sun server and replaced them with Intel/Linux boxes. We probably shitcanned, I don't know, 20 or 30 servers. The Intel boxes were easily 3-4x faster. Couldn't give the Suns away, the price had dropped to basically zero. Everybody knew they were overpriced dogs. Everybody except Sun, I guess. For years, Sun had to compete with its own used equipment that was flooding the market from failed dot-coms, along with much cheaper and better Intel boxes. It's a miracle they're alive at all.

So now Sun tries to reinvent itself, and I hope they do. At least they've realized their predicament while there's still some cash in the bank, unlike the DECies, who just rolled over and sold out before the sky fell in on them.

Re:Classical big-company problem

[jcr]

If DEC had been firing on all cylinders, they would have named it the "VAX 790", and touted the fact that it was as fast as the 780, but took up 1/2 the rack space, and sold it for the same price as the 780.

-jcr

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Anonymous Coward]

A wallah is the chappy who serves the afternoon G&T. Or more likely these days, takes your helpline call. :)

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Bruce Perens]

I don't care what people say, 36 bits is here to stay!

Re:Classical big-company problem

[reynhout]

Do you really think Solaris on a Sun box prices out ahead of Linux on generic Intel hardware?

I realize it's not a fair comparison (at all!), but it's exactly the question being asked by systems people every day.

Maybe you're just talking about the Solaris license cost (free with a HW purchase) plus the media cost ($95/disk set a few years ago, probably less now). In which case, OK. No argument.

But it's rare to come across a business *need* that requires Solaris over Linux any more. (And it's only slightly less rare to come across a business need that requires Oracle...)

Inertia and employee familiarity sell more Sun boxes than business need. When the above are lacking, Linux gets the "sale" every time. I really think this is the right choice, too. I could replicate a million dollar Sun environment that I built in 1999 for $50k today (plus $70k or so of Cisco tax). Individual systems wouldn't be as reliable, but the environment as a whole would be as good or better.

Re:Classical big-company problem

[Bruce Perens]

My point was that Windows on the Itanic was thought by many in the mid-90's to be the future of workstations - thus making Sun irrelevant.

Yes. But we can take that even farther. There's a well-known story about HP buying Microsoft's assurance, in 1995, that MS would soon bring out an enterprise quality NT for servers as well as workstations. That may now have happened, but sure didn't in the decade they said it would. HP chose not to invest in its Unix lines at that point, and let Sun run away with their scientific workstation market, their server market, and so on. This was a direct cause of HP's pre-merger financial woes.

Bruce

Re:Classical big-company problem

[jedidiah]

Compared to the price of Oracle, the cost of RHEL is just noise. The real question is what's going to do better and which platform your vendor is concentrating on.

These days if you're interested in Oracle, that platform is no longer Solaris Sparc. It's Linux.

Re:Classical big-company problem

[calidoscope]

There's a well-known story about HP buying Microsoft's assurance, in 1995, that MS would soon bring out an enterprise quality NT for servers as well as workstations.

IIRC, one of the HP execs (initials R.P.) that bought into this went on to SGI, then MS and now someplace else. HP had Lotus port 123 and Ami-Pro to HP-UX and had a nice package in the 9000/712. The latter would have made for a nice business desktop - VUE beat the eff'ing pants off of Win 3.x and upgrade from "sam" was much friendlier than any install utility for Windoze.

Sigh.

Sun lucked out in getting the FPS portion of Cray. They also did a decent job with the "Darwin" workstations of the late 90's - but dropped the ball with the Sun Blade 100 - Sun needs to have good hardware at the low end to remain competitive. They stand a chance with the Opteron boxes (and possibly the 90nm US-IIIi) and they do need to keep the AMD64 port of Solaris on schedule.

I did RTFA last night and wasn't that impressed - get a lot more insight reading comp.arch.

Re:Classical big-company problem

[fferreres]

If you can't read any further, how do you know about his Clayton comments? I would have expected your post to be at +5 Funny or -1 Troll, but never at +X Informative...

Re:Classical big-company problem

[stuntpope]

"You don't happen to use "formally" instead of "formerly" too, such as in, "I formally had credibility, but then I used 'wala' instead of 'voilà'"?"

Well, he could of, but that would be a whole nother topic. ;)

I'm kind of disappointed ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I couldn't find the word "beleagured" anywhere in the article.

Oh, wait. Sun, not Apple. Got it.

Re:I'm kind of disappointed ...

[hackstraw]

I'm not sure what is true in the article. It says:

Today, Intel's processors are twice as fast as SPARC chips, and McNealy admits that his biggest regret is "not putting Solaris on [Intel's chips] six or seven years ago."

Look at the dates here:

-rw-r--r-- 1 213 users 213275 Oct 3 1998 jpeg.6b.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 213 users 48524 Oct 3 1998 zlib.1.1.3.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 213 users 3153437 Sep 17 1998 perl5.004.04.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 213 users 2650181 Sep 9 1998 GNUgroff.1.11.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tgz
-rw-r--r- - 1 213 users 1184 Sep 1 1998 xtitle.1.0.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 213 users 1201538 Jul 25 1998 rcs.5.7.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 213 users 153600 Jul 25 1998 GNUzip.1.2.4.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 213 users 177963 Jul 25 1998 GNUflex.2.5.4a.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tgz
-rw-r--r -- 1 213 users 165997 Jul 25 1998 GNUm4.1.4.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 213 users 38548534 Jul 9 1998 X11R6.3.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 213 users 914888 Dec 18 1997 pbmplus.10dec91.i86pc.Solaris.2.6.pkg.tgz
-rw-r-- r-- 1 213 users 1105988 Feb 9 1997 rcs.5.7.i86pc.Solaris.2.5.1.pkg.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 213 users 71590 Sep 28 1996 GNUm4.1.4.i86pc.Solaris.2.5.1.pkg.tgz
ncftp ...packages/solaris/i86pc >

Hmm...

Re:I'm kind of disappointed ...

[Idarubicin]

I couldn't find the word "beleagured" anywhere in the article.

That's 'cuz you misspelled 'beleaguered'. :D

Damn, no comments yet...

[johannesg]

Oh well, I guess that means I'll have to read the article.

Everything is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG Sun is dying
OMG Apple is dying
OMG *BSD is dying
OMG Linux is ... wait a minute. Almost slipped.

Re:Everything is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Apple is doing pretty good as well.

Re:Everything is dying

[IMightB]

Hey you stole my post

Re:Everything is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's the joke... Apple's imminent demise has been predicted for like the last 25 years.

Re:Everything is dying

[skaffen42]

Yep. Everything is dying. Aint entropy a bitch? :)

Re:Everything is dying

[vsprintf]

Yep. Everything is dying. Aint entropy a bitch? :)

None of us are getting out of here alive. Of course if you die with enough Karma, you get Nirvana for eternity (a great reason for negative mods if ever I heard one).

I'm confused about "wildly"

[AndroidCat]

"The Internet is still wildly underhyped, underutilized, and underimplemented

How do you wildly underhype something? (Or even wildly underutilize or underimplement.) Does it involve caffeinated valium?

Re:I'm confused about "wildly"

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you wildly underhype something? (Or even wildly underutilize or underimplement.)

From the example above, you underhype, underutilize, and underimplement your own thought processes whenever you post something lame to slashdot.

*ducks*

Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[Anonymous Coward]

SUN started in the 1980s as a Unix workstation vendor. They were very successful because, for a Unix vendor they were pretty cheap. Unfortunately for SUN, the PC was cheaper and progressed much faster than anyone in the 80s or early 90s could have imagined, and surpassed the SUN workstations while remaining much cheaper. Although SUN still has a pretty good presence in High-End computing, the market there was never really that big (apart from the fluke during the dot-com boom).

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[perlchild]

Going back several years, there's a lot more Sun Workstations that were used as servers than anyone at Sun cares to admit. That market got absorbed by the i386 linux market, that's why they bought Cobalt, they were trying to recuperate some customers(but customers who wouldn't admit they every bought Suns...)

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[Angry Toad]

There is a use for Sun Workstations apart from being a server?

I'm only partially trolling with that - I'm no IT person, but I've been in a great many places with a great many Sun Workstations, and can count the number of times I've seen someone sitting at one of them actually working on one or two hands.

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[mst76]

> the PC was cheaper and progressed much faster than anyone in the 80s or early 90s could have imagined,

As obvious as this is today, I think just about EVERYONE in the computer industry underestimated the decendants of the IBM PC 5150. If you look at the PC today, it is hard to believe that it's direct ancestor, the IBM PC, was barely more powerful than the Commodore 64.

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[fanatic]

Many Network Management workstations were Sun boxes. People did in fact sit at them.

Timeview, used to manage Timeplex's T1/T3 Multiplexers, comes to mind. And Cabletron had a product called Spectrum, used to manage their hubs, or whatever other stuff you were running, also ran on solaris on Sparc.

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[bladesjester]

I saw lots of hands working at sun workstations. The were the machine of choice for our programming labs at my uni. There were probably 4 or 5 sun labs and only one or two windows ones.

and this was at a university who had a software lic agreement with microsoft that ms reallllly wanted to get out of.

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone except Microsoft, Intel, Novell, Linus Torvolds, etc etc.

The PC has been positioned to take over midrange computing ever since the 286 came out. This point was hammered home time and time again in ziff-davis magazines that Sun Executives could have picked up at the airport. The fact that they got through the twentyth century without figuring this out says something.

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[gbjbaanb]

Microsoft practically gives away software to academia, hook 'em and keep 'em is the reason why.

There is absolutely no reason why MS would care how many copies of its software you used. As long as when you left, joined a company and bought the licence for you to use then.

Its an excellent marketing strategy, costs MS nothing (that they'd get otherwise) and they also get to appear to be playing nice with poor academic institutions.

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[AndroidCat]

IBM didn't really underestimate where the PC was going, but internal politics tried to put the genie back in the bottle. Their minicomputer division saw it and didn't want their product line obsoleted. As a result, IBM was slow to release a 386 machine which let compatable clone makers establish themselves as brand names.

The IBM PC was significately more powerful than the C64. Even from our current god-like perspective that one ant still looks a bit larger than the other. :)

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[AndroidCat]

Some places with more budget than sense made them their standard development platform for developing stuff to run on smaller machines.

In the early 90s, the company I was at was interested in PC-GEOS to run their Windows app on older PCs. The SUN workstation required (at the time) for the development suite kind of killed that idea. (It was a contractual obligation death-march project and couldn't get expensive toys like that. Poot.)

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[_Sprocket_]

I'm only partially trolling with that - I'm no IT person, but I've been in a great many places with a great many Sun Workstations, and can count the number of times I've seen someone sitting at one of them actually working on one or two hands.

It depends on how you want to define "server". I always found that in the *nix world, the distinction was rather arbitrary. And that was a technical plus. But sometimes a political negative.

I used to admin a Unix lab in a major US Government research facility. It consisted of roughly 20 workstations - some HP, mostly Sun. The Division's management had began expressing concern over the underutilization of the lab. After all, they would poke their head in the door and rarely see anybody sitting in front of any of the keyboards. What they didn't understand was that the lab got heavy use. We had engineers logged in from down the street. And we had engineers scattered throughout the building who, using a combination of PuTTY and Hummingbird's Exceed, were happily working away via their "office automation" Wintel boxes from the comfort of their own desks.

There were a couple of engineers who preferred walking down to the lab to work. So one would occasionally find them physically there. But they weren't my heavy users and they didn't help perception of the lab's use. I often joked that I was going to rig up a cardboard silhouette that would pop up in front of a keyboard when someone logged in to the box.

A couple years after I left the lab, I heard that it had been entirely replaced with Windows boxes. It's a shame. My user base had always complained about using WinNT boxes when they went to train on the software we were using. To my pleasant suprise, they preferred the Unix systems at work. I can only hope, for their sakes, that Win2K was kinder to them than NT (and they didn't mind the walk to the lab).

Re:Simple: the PC killed the SUN

[bladesjester]

The reason ms hated our license is partially because it extended past university computers. Any student or staff member could get free copies of the software (office, windows, and several other packages including visual studio) for personal use at several locations in the university by walking up and asking for it. The ones that they couldn't just give away were usually about $5-10 per copy.

Microsoft made sure part of that was revoked when the license came up for renewal about a year ago. Since I know the people who were in charge of those negotiations, I can safely say that ms really wanted out of part of the previous agreement.

New numbers out soon

[deanj]

The new numbers for the latest quarter are coming out soon, so we'll have more to go on then.

I do find it a little distrubing that I'm even saying something like that.... The short term mentality for success is putting a lot of un-needed pressure on companies.

Anyway, like a previous poster said, this is the quarterly, "Oh, Sun's gonna die soon" thread. Don't believe it.

Look at SGI. They were going great during the early nineties and had their legs cut out from under 'em when the ATI/NVidia wars started and people realized they didn't need to buy those mondo-expensive graphics systems anymore.

Yet, they're still alive. Barely, but they're still alive.

It takes a lot to kill a company, and Sun's not going anywhere anytime soon. They have $7 BILLION in cash in the bank right now, have a strong R&D budget.

They're not going anywhere. Either is McNealy.

Re:New numbers out soon

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes a lot to kill a company, and Sun's not going anywhere anytime soon. They have $7 BILLION in cash in the bank right now, have a strong R&D budget.

They're not going anywhere. Either is McNealy.

And project looking glass looks really awesome for those who haven't seen it, it's a 3D gui that sits on top of Solaris or Linux and adds a lot more functionality. I'm not sure how they will 3.Profit off of it, but it's pretty badass.

Re:New numbers out soon

[ansible]

They have $7 BILLION in cash in the bank right now, have a strong R&D budget.

Take a look at their P&L's. Seven billion doesn't last that long with a company that size if you're not making money.

They're not going anywhere. Either is McNealy.

That's exactly the problem, if you read the article. I hope some of that new research on running multiple tasks simultaneously works out for them.

However, I think a billion spent on cluster computing would be a better bet. I think they were going in the right direction with the hot desktop switching. They just need to take it to the next level. A PC is more than a screen and a keyboard+mouse.

We have scanners, CD burners, webcams, and all kinds of other peripherals we want to use. Give me all that, and give me reliable access to my applications (office, ERP, calendars, development tools, etc. served off off a big fault-tolerant cluster) and now you're talking.

Re:New numbers out soon

[Anonymous Coward]

> Look at SGI.

Who?

Oh ... so Sun is going to become a hollow irrelevant shell of a company. SGI has OpenGL (which nVidia steers), I guess Sun will have Java (which IBM will steer).

Re:New numbers out soon

[dshannon]

Take a look at their P&L's. Seven billion doesn't last that long with a company that size if you're not making money.

You're clearly not an accountant then. Cashflow and profit (or in Sun's case, loss) are different things. In my opinion, Sun's problem lies in converting their wealth of vision into reality at the consulting level. Here in Australia they seem to be desperate for consulting revenue, but can't provide great consultants to back up the great vision that issues forth from Menlo Park's EBC. However, some of their disruptive moves - like the Java Enterprise System's licensing model - work extremely well, but it will take a while for the business cycle to demonstrate whether client uptake will deliver the $$$

Re:New numbers out soon

[(H)elix1]

I do find it a little distrubing that I'm even saying something like that.... The short term mentality for success is putting a lot of un-needed pressure on companies.

As a stockholder for the past four years - I say it is not just the day traders they should be afraid of... I let my geek side stop me from dumping them because I wanted to believe they could turn things around. These guys needed a solid plan (and stuck with it rather than changing every week) - and the buck stops at McNealy.

Yah, I'm not bitter...

Re:New numbers out soon

[drooling-dog]

It takes a lot to kill a company, and Sun's not going anywhere anytime soon. They have $7 BILLION in cash in the bank right now, have a strong R&D budget.

If nothing else, their cash may make them an attractive acquisition target. That is how big companies die...

Re:New numbers out soon

[johne_ganz]

hey have $7 BILLION in cash in the bank right now, have a strong R&D budget.

Where did you get these numbers? Yahoo shows that they have 2.37B in cash, and 1.47B in debt.

Re:New numbers out soon

[DeepRedux]

According to their last quarterly report (10Q) they have 1.50B in cash, 0.87B in short-term debt securities and 3.11B in long-term debt securities.

Strictly speaking, Sun has at most 1.50B "cash in the bank".

Yahoo's "cash" is cash plus short-term bonds (2.37B). If longer term holdings are included the total is 5.48B, still short of the original poster's claim of 7B.

Re:New numbers out soon

[deanj]

I'm going by what McNealy stated on-stage at JavaOne several weeks ago.

Re:New numbers out soon

[saintlupus]

And project looking glass looks really awesome for those who haven't seen it, it's a 3D gui that sits on top of Solaris or Linux and adds a lot more functionality. I'm not sure how they will 3.Profit off of it, but it's pretty badass.

Have you actually tried USING Looking Glass at all? I was at JavaOne, and there was a pavilion booth there with JDS and Looking Glass systems to play with. JDS was a pleasant surprise; I'm sort of partial to Gnome anyway, but it was a nice skinned version of Gnome that I could see deploying to my users.

Looking Glass, on the other hand, was a trainwreck. A nice, 3d, cute-looking trainwreck, but a nightmare all the same. I spent ten minutes trying to get it to do anything but run that stupid CD selector applet. No dice.

--saint

Re:Apostrophe

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that: you also don't need two "the's" in front of a word :7

No, you need experience.

[Moderation abuser]

First, you must have some experience of having brought another major corporation to it's knees in the past.

On a serious note, why is it that CEOs are rewarded very handsomely for poor performance and failure when the rest of us get fired when we don't get the job done, or even are perceived as not being value for money?

Re:No, you need experience.

[Zocalo]

First, you must have some experience of having brought another major corporation to its knees in the past.

So, you're saying that Darl McBride might still have career opportunities after SCO? Damn.

Then again, SCO isn't a major corporation and was already scrabbling in the industry detritus when he took over, so there's still hope.

Re:No, you need experience.

[CodeArtisan]

That's easy. CEO and Director compensation is such a highly complex issue that it is usually decided by an external review body. And the composition of this review body ? A bunch of Directors and CEOs from other companies. Seems fair.

Re:No, you need experience.

[the_mad_poster]

I always figured that if you were at the top of the heap, and you were surrounded by friends, you could do pretty much anything you want.

In theory, to get to the top, you should know what's best for the business, how to implement what's best for the business, and be trustworthy to do so. However, anymore, it seems like an ivy league degree and some friends in high places are what it takes to get to the top. People aren't made into leaders just because they have that little slip of paper. Sure, it helps cultivate people who already have the talent, but just forcing your way through school won't make you a leader if you didn't have the skills to begin with.

OTOH, people like us are viewed as "resources". Therefore, we can be replaced, upgraded, downgraded, or simply pitched out like used up garbage. We have the skills, but not the connections. The people who have the connections frequently don't have the skills to evaluate OUR skills because they were hired, again, because of their little piece of paper rather than promoted because of what they proved they knew.

It really is a scary deformation of the way things are supposed to be. I'm sure management has a different view of things, but that's how I see it, and, from talking to other people, I don't seem to be alone in having that view.

Re:No, you need experience.

[bfields]

First, you must have some experience of having brought another major corporation to its knees in the past.

So, you're saying that Darl McBride might still have career opportunities after SCO? Damn.

His busy schedule of making bizarre unsubstantiated claims also earned him over a million dollars last year.

A couple of years of that, and many people would stop worrying about future career opportunities completely....

--Bruce Fields

Re:No, you need experience.

[Roached]

I'm a software engineer who recieved my Masters in CS and am about to complete an MBA as well, so I've got some perspective from both sides.

Basically, you're right in that management views you as a resource that is somewhat replaceable. To expand on this though, you're not as easily replaceable as the fry cook at McDonalds so a little more strategy is involved. In order to accomodate for this, the MBA program teaches classes in "Leadership" and "Organizational Behavior". These classes veil themsleves as "making the employees happy an productive" but the reality is that they are courses in how to manipulate people into doing what you want, possibly to their detriment, while still thinking things are great.

Someone skilled in these management tools can keep you thinking you're work environment is awesome right up till you get your pink slip.

Bottom line: always look out for yourself and never trust the management

Re:No, you need experience.

[rcs1000]

"it seems like an ivy league degree and some friends in high places are what it takes to get to the top."

According to xap.com, about 5,000 students graduate from Yale each year; Harvard has (a surprisingly modest) 2,000; Duke comes in at a little over 3,000; and U Penn (Philadephia)is a smidgen below 4,000. There are probably other Ivy League Universities (I'm a Brit, so I'm not even dead certain all these are Ivy League either...)

Now; lets assume a conservative (before business school and Masters degrees) 15,000 people get Ivy League degrees a year.

Given each of these people probably knows at least one person in a "high place" - heck they're students (or at least only recently ex-students), they're bound to know at least a couple of stoners, that means that there are at least 15,000 of these people coming into existence each year.

Lets assume a conservative 50% think that the job of CEO of a Fortune 500 company is a cool job. (I personally would enjoy a $2m+ package. Ooops. Tell a lie; according to Forbes, it's a little below $5m. My mistake.) So, that means 7,500 grads need to race through the CEO position of 500 companies a year: i.e. a two month tenure.

Where do I sign up?

Re:No, you need experience.

[telbij]

OTOH, people like us are viewed as "resources". Therefore, we can be replaced, upgraded, downgraded, or simply pitched out like used up garbage. We have the skills, but not the connections. The people who have the connections frequently don't have the skills to evaluate OUR skills because they were hired, again, because of their little piece of paper rather than promoted because of what they proved they knew.

And yet because of business you can get a job that pays $75,000 a year, have cheap commodity hardware to play on, and live in a world largely shaped by the efforts of 'people like us'.

Look, of course business has a tendency towards evil. It's sad that the most altruistic and non-money-oriented people don't get paid more, but the truth is as immutable as a physical law: People with lots of money and power are generally that way because they pursue it. Sure they need us to have power, and it's a bit of a good ol' boys club, but we are all complicit because a) we are not so power hungry, and b) they give us cool stuff.

I know it's frustrating to be viewed as nothing more than a cog, but don't let it bother you. The powerful few view everyone this way, and why not? They couldn't run a business if they took the time to know how to evaluate every type of employee. You can take consolation in the fact that they are no more likely to be happy then you are, and probably have a much higher stress-level. They are surrounded by sharks day in and day out, and may have a very difficult time discovering who their true friends are (if any).

Bottom line is, we didn't choose this career for money and peer recognition is more important than manager recognition anyway. If they knew what you knew they wouldn't need you, so be thankful you have a job doing something you love. This is a pretty unique time in history as far as that goes.

Re:No, you need experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the techniques never work. People see through it, and complain about how stupid and evil their management is and how they hate their jobs. So what's the point of the facade if it's ineffective?

Re:No, you need experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

> So what's the point of the facade if it's ineffective?

to compensate for a little penis, as always.

Re:No, you need experience.

[Pathetic Coward]

Not as easily replaceable?

McDonalds fry cooks can't be replaced by workers in Bangalore.

Re:No, you need experience.

[the_mad_poster]

Um. There are a hell of a lot more than 500 CEO positions. In fact, the "Helzburg School of Management" (yea.. THAT doesn't sound like the punchline to a Dilbert joke) claims 1800 of its own alumni in CEO positions by itself.

I also believe I said MANAGEMENT, not CEO specifically (but, I'm too lazy to go check). My bad if I specified only CEOs, I'm referring to the whole of "upper" management here.

Re:No, you need experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

On a serious note, why is it that CEOs are rewarded very handsomely for poor performance and failure...?

Official answer: Because business is like a game of cards and you have to play the hand you've been dealt... the well-compensated CEO engineered an oucome for the stockholders that was the best that could be expected under the circumstances.

Cynical answer: Because they can be.

Re:No, you need experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the way its always been. Thats what they call the "Good ol'e boys club". It's the same club that got Bush Jr. into the American white house. It's what makes the American political system what it is today.

It has indirectly made the American public education system what it is today. It started back with Ford et. al., and continues today because Ford et. al. established the means to keep their children in power and riches, and the average American worker as an unquestioning 'worker bee'.

Re:No, you need experience.

[rcs1000]

I wasn't being serious. I largely agree with your post: I just think that most Ivy League graduates, with or without friends in high places don't end up CEOs of anything.

I graduated from Cambridge University in '95 (admittedly with a philosophy degree, and a penchant for good wine). None of my friends - even the wekk connected ones - look like they are going to end up CEOs of anything, not even the Local 7-11.

Yet many of the CEOs I know (especially those who started their own company) are self-educated. Many of these entreuprenerial types never saw the attraction of sitting around smoking pot and discussing the existence of God. (Essay question: is Universalisability a Necessary Part of a Moral System? Apply to the Bush White House.)

Anycase, anyone can be a CEO. Start your own company - become employee number one and CEO...

Re:No, you need experience.

[elmegil]

Given that McNealy is a FOUNDER of the company, I hardly think he got where he is by having an Ivy League degree and some friends.

Re:No, you need experience.

[yintercept]

Basically, you're right in that management views you as a resource that is somewhat replaceable.

Unfortunately, one of the goals of management is to assure that its employees are replaceable. For the health of the organization, you do not want to create a dependency on any one person or group. The company has to assure that they will still be able to function if any network admin or programmer leaves. For that matter, I believe it wise to migrate employees through different positions in the company to reduce dependencies. Likewise it is wise to keep as close as possible to standard practices making it easier to find replacements.

One of the main reasons that franchising is so successful is because the internal functioning of the franchise is so well defined that it all but eliminates the individual quirks of the employees.

Personally, I hate how this methodology marginalizes humans. I like human quirks. But most people would prefer to eat a McDonalds or shop at a Walmart where the procedures are well defined and the service is consistent to one filled with imagination.

Re:No, you need experience.

[vsprintf]

On a serious note, why is it that CEOs are rewarded very handsomely for poor performance and failure when the rest of us get fired when we don't get the job done, or even are perceived as not being value for money?

Why indeed? The previous CEO of Northwestern Power made many millions annually and had obscene perks while he drove the company into bankruptcy and devastated the long-term shareholders, who were mostly just regular customers of the utility. After he was fired/resigned, the board of directors attempted to give him a bonus for a year in which he wasn't even employed by the company. That kind of stuff makes me see red.

Re:No, you need experience.

[vsprintf]

I'm a software engineer who recieved my Masters in CS and am about to complete an MBA as well, so I've got some perspective from both sides.

Turn back from the dark side before it's too late. (Only slightly kidding.)

Re:No, you need experience.

[vsprintf]

And yet because of business you can get a job that pays $75,000 a year, have cheap commodity hardware to play on, and live in a world largely shaped by the efforts of 'people like us'.

The point is that the "business" is not the CEO, and the CEO is not the "business." Giving the CEO $20 million per year for an often-failed job does not generate more of those "$75,000 a year" jobs for the rest of us - especially when the CEO decides to pump her bonus by offshoring those jobs. High CEO compensation decreases the number of those jobs, both through redirection of capital (to the CEO) and the loss of business due to poor, overly-compensated management.

Re:No, you need experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

For that matter, I believe it wise to migrate employees through different positions in the company to reduce dependencies.

Now that's an interesting comment. On several occasions now, I've accepted a job offer for position X (detailed job description confirmed in writing), only to be switched onto something completely different, due to brainless zombie management deciding that they want "the most qualified graduate working on Task Y". Yes I did complain, only to be given two weeks of what I should have been doing, before being fired. The attitude of the braindead management being "you should be happy to be working in our corporation".

I really would like to find out the author of the book who dreamed up that mindless philosophy.

Out of curiosity, how would you handle the situation where someone has found their dream job (eg. 3D game engine architect). Would you bump them over to AI just for the thrill? Only to see them leave and set up their own company months later (And even taking other programmers with them)?

Re:No, you need experience.

[Refrag]

The cool thing about being a CEO is that when you run a company into the ground, it is looked at as experience when you are hunting for your next CEO gig.

Re:No, you need experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

On a serious note, why is it that CEOs are rewarded very handsomely for poor performance and failure when the rest of us get fired when we don't get the job done, or even are perceived as not being value for money?

Because company boards want their CEOs to take risks. If they start punishing CEOs when their plans fail, then future CEOs will always play safe to preserve their salary. Such a CEO tactic would be disastrous for the company's competitiveness and ultimately it survival.

Read Dixit and Nalebuff, "Thinking Strategically."

Re:No, you need experience.

[Centinel]

McDonalds fry cooks can't be replaced by workers in Bangalore.

Ah, but that's where the check-pants golfer, yacht-basin Republicans (a somewhat accurate euphamism for "management" -- represented by the WSJ editorial page) employ their other prong:

open immigration and lax borders to obain a steady supply of cheap labor (off the books, with no pension, work comp, etc) for businesses with facilities in the US.

So while it's true that a McD's fry cook won't be replaced by someone in Bangalore, he will be replaced by an illegal Mexican.

Whether it's offshoring or illegals, either way Middle America gets screwed.

Re:No, you need experience.

[Deadguy2322]

Hell, here in Canada, the fry cook, and 80% of the rest of the staff at McD's probably came over from Bangalore for the job!

Re:No, you need experience.

[ChrisMaple]

If they knew what you knew they wouldn't need you

Not necessarily true. One person can only do so much. If a CEO knew what every one of his 500 employees knew, he still couldn't do all the work himself.

Re:No, you need experience.

[NateTech]

"Anymore" it seems like an Ivy League and friends is the way to the top?

Hell, it's always been that way. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Re:No, you need experience.

[the_mad_poster]

For that matter, I believe it wise to migrate employees through different positions in the company to reduce dependencies.

So... you believe it wise to identify an inidividual who has shown a skillset that makes them well suited to a particular job and then.... give them a different job?

This is why everyone hates management. There's no logic, no intelligent drive. It's almost as if managers are identified by their ability to take the LEAST intelligent, LEAST sensible route and are thickheaded enough not to listen to anyone who tells them that's what they're doing.

disagree with article

[HBI]

It makes some broad brush statements about Java facilitating sales of Sun's big boxes. This just isn't so. Java had nothing to do with it. There was a time, early on in the commercialization of the Internet, that you bought Sun if you wanted a reliable web server. That's what sold Sun boxes. This is long over, however.

IBM Global Services pulled the plug on its Sun hosting somewhere around June 2001 - that was the first sign of things to come. A whole side of a huge server room populated with disconnected Sun boxes waiting for collection and ultimate resale, i'm sure. Did not bode well for Sun.

The Army is not using Sun boxes for critical systems anymore - the last dozen-odd projects I have seen have been Win32 or even Linux in basis. Lots of junk Sun equipment floating around, whether on Ebay or in storage closets.

The company is ultimately dead unless it reinvents itself - that is true enough. Saying that Java or R&D expenditures have anything to do with it is sophistry. The elimination of the value added associated with Sun's gear in real world applications is the reason why the company (as currently constituted) is doomed. There's just not enough difference between what they offer and what is offered for a much lower price point by other vendors.

They do have many quarters worth of cash to lose, of course. It isn't going to happen tomorrow, but they are rapidly becoming irrelevant, even if they still exist.

Re:disagree with article

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, that part stuck out like s sore thumb to me. Java never contributed significantly to SUN's hardware sales. It is difficult to even understand how it could do so. Java has put some money into SUN's coffers through their rather high licensing and certification fees, and that's about all Java has done for SUN, which is fine, because SUN hasn't done much for Java either.

Java will never really succeed at least until SUN turns it loose. I know companies that have tried to use Java in mass-market (as opposed to Enterprise) products, and it is a major imposition. Even if you write your own JVM and libraries, you still and up paying SUN, and you end up writing a lot of extra libraries, even if you don't use them, because you have to meet the spec before SUN will even take your money. And if you don't have virtual memory, all that extra code just wastes RAM too.

It's like telling you you can't sell a claw hammer unless it can drive in railroad spikes and concrete anchors as well as the conventional nails you wanted to use it on.

Re:disagree with article

[Anonymous Coward]

"IBM Global Services pulled the plug on its Sun hosting somewhere around June 2001"

Are you just pulling this stuff out of your ass? I work for Sun, deal with IGS on a regular basis, and they are bigtime Sun *fans*. Blows me away every time I talk to them. The number one deployment platform for IBM software such as DB2 and Websphere remains... Sun.

"The Army is not using Sun boxes for critical systems anymore"

Again, where are you getting this?

Re:disagree with article

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm -- I've seen a fair amount of Sun kit running Java Applications. Although mostly just for Oracle.

Perhaps you guys missed the marketing for J2EE -- It's "scalable" in that its bloated and slow, but you could always add more Sun hardware.

Re:disagree with article

[ciggieposeur]

The number one deployment platform for IBM software such as DB2 and Websphere remains... Sun.

Interesting. It sounds to me like the IGS reps are probably telling you what you want to hear.

In my experience, IBM's software actually runs "best" (most reliably, and given enough $$$ runs fastest) on pSeries/zSeries. I used to work for Software Group (you can groan if you want -- SWG has its own issues) and we had a lot more hassles using DB2 and WebSphere on Solaris than AIX, Windows, or Linux. Mainly due to IBM's requirement to use the Sun JVM on Solaris -- the Sun JVM enterprise extensions (CORBA, JCE, etc) aren't quite as solid in combination with WebSphere as IBM's version of those libraries.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't see much real *hostility* to Sun hardware inside Big Blue. I'm sure if I was supporting an existing Sun deployment I'd talk about all the happy things that IBM can do there, but if I was selling *new* hardware, I'd try to get some pSeries boxes sold before anything else. I can't imagine that IGS would on the whole be driving ambivalent customers *toward* Sun.

The GP is correct about one thing, though: the default IGS web hosting environment for extremely high-volume web sites is done on IBM hardware.

Re:disagree with article

[HBI]

I was the one disconnecting all the Sun boxes at one IGS facility - when we were done, the Sun boxes were carted off.

I can't and won't tell you how I know about the Army thing. Suffice to say it's a fact.

Re:disagree with article

[HBI]

Ok, that's needlessly cryptic. Check out modern Army systems in publically available materials and you'll find only legacy stuff over 5 years old was based on a Solaris/Sun base.

Go ahead.

Re:disagree with article

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't and won't tell you how I know about the Army thing. Suffice to say it's a fact.

You're full of shit. Suffice to say THAT is a fact.

Otherwise this Army code I've been involved with is vaporware... though they did have us test port it to linux.

And yeah, these are major systems.

Re:disagree with article

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, right!

Good god the army is using Windows - I remember seeing a Nova documentary where the army guys where resetting their WinNT box!

Someday they gone get a big worm and we'll all be in deep sh**t.

Thanx M$

Re:disagree with article

[HBI]

Why do you think most if not all tactical applications are producing a LIGHT version using COTS software - which isn't fucking Solaris, dumbass. It's Win32 or Linux, depending on program. Legacy shit is still Sun, but it's going away.

Hmm, who's the AC here - sounds like you're a Sun fanboy.

Wonder who's full of shit.

Re:disagree with article

[einhverfr]

Are you just pulling this stuff out of your ass? I work for Sun, deal with IGS on a regular basis, and they are bigtime Sun *fans*.

Right, and SUN is a big-time Wintel Fan.

And Dominos is a big time Pizza Hut fan....

If my competitor said they were a big-time fan of my business, I would assume that they had bad intentions towards me.

The PC put the knife in but Sun twisted it

[Anonymous Coward]

The PC was just a wound, it is Sun itself which is killing Sun. More acuratly it is the Sun directors which are causing harm. Watching Sun is like watching a schizophrenic. Do they hate Linux or love Linux this week? Do they love Java or hate Jav this week? Will they dilute the Java brand name with some other half assed project only tangebly connected with Java or will they hype up some new super-cool Java feature? Will they hate Microsoft or be in bed with them this week? Will they, won't they? Yes, no?

It would be unfair to say that Sun don't have any direction. They do; but it involves thousands of twists and u-turns and someone keeps changing the map.

Re:The PC put the knife in but Sun twisted it

[chromatic]

I wrote a little program to generate Sun's strategy. Here's what they're doing today:

• Sparc works on the desktop.
• Java belongs on servers.
• Linux means nothing to us.
• Solaris should be open source.

Next month, it'll be:

• Sparc will never be open source.
• Solaris works on the desktop.
• Java means nothing to us.
• Linux should be open source.

(I realize that half of those statements make no sense. That's how you know it's working.)

Sun's Future

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the last chance Sun is going to get is going to be Niagra and Rock. If they come out on time, at a reasonable price and do what Sun is promising then there will be nothing to compete with it. Think about it, you are talking something like current 32 way performance on a single chip prob 2U rackmount box - while not everyone will want it it will really be a sweet spot for application servers and the like.

The only trouble will be if they can live on what kit they offer at the moment, which needs a serious performance boost if it is going to keep up with the upcoming Power5 kit.

Re:Sun's Future

[calidoscope]

I think the last chance Sun is going to get is going to be Niagra and Rock.

And I would add getting the AMD-64 port of Solaris out the door on schedule. One of their most critical tasks is maintaining developer mindshare for Solaris.

Re:Sun's Future

[njcoder]

Their N1 provisioning stuff should be coming out around the same time as those boxes. SHould be an interesting combination for corporate data centers and hosting companies.

Sun thinks of the Enterprise too much. They're a small company and need to worry about their focus but I'd like to see them promoting their iforce partners more and helping to build a bigger SMB base.

Re:Sun's future

[einhverfr]

I don;t think that Sun will go out of business.

Think about it. What was Nokia's first product? Paper. They also made products out of rubber (hence Nokia tires). Now they no longer make paper, and their primary product is the cell phone.

Montana Power Company used to produce... wait... electrical power. Now they manufacture computers.

Given these trends, Sun could become a bottled water company for all I can see, but they will probably not go out of business.

Astrophysically speaking...

[Beast in Black]

...does this mean that when Sun actually dies, it will turn into a black hole and suck all the other silicon valley companies down? It sure is massive enough :)

Re:Astrophysically speaking...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's right.

Re:Astrophysically speaking...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shoot. Some of Silicon Valey companies are great. Quick, force Sun to relocate their HQ to Redmond!!

How is SUN dieing?

[Dillusionary]

I work in an environment that has roughly 4k+ UNIX servers, 90% of them are ALL SUN. I don't see them going away anytime soon. More Slashdot FUD Please.....

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[iggymanz]

I too have worked in major Sun installations over the past 15 years, but the point is they are losing market share that does not seem to be coming back. The list of things a Sun box can do that a Linux box could not still exists, but it's getting shorter. Maybe Sun will do something to reverse the trend

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean "doing", or "dying"

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[Chagrin]

Some day your management will realize that the expensive servers they're buying really aren't worth that much. It shouldn't take that long to realize that you're paying too much for what has now become commodity hardware.

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like your company is dying too -- and you don't even realize it!

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[kurt555gs]

Can you say Dual G5 X-Serve?

When it comes to raw hardware power, a new Dual 2.5 Ghz PowerMac is $3000.00

Please tell me what Sun has in this price performance ratio?

Huh?

Nothing!

So it is not just the PC's eating away at the low end, Apple can eat Sun's higher end.

Oh, and with the 2.6 kernal, what does Solaris have that can't be had for free in Linux.

They (Sun) just do not have anything to offer any more.

Cheers

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[mritunjai]

Instead of modding, I think I should reply to you sir!

What kind of service exactly are you getting from ebay or newegg ???

Yeah, its true that SUN's hardware is expensive... but when shit hits the fan and your server is down... and you're losing money 1000 transactions BY THE MINUTE, you really need someone to come down and save you!!

This is enterprise grade hardware... not any DIY stuff!

If you can manage a whole day replacing and restoring everything from backup, and waiting for your homemade RAID to replicate all data, by ALL means do that. Incidently there are a LOT of businesses that can NOT afford that.

The only problem with SUN is that they've overengineered their products and right now, the market for such exotic stuff is limited... and SUN has been slow to respond to changes.

If you want to blame their management for that, do it. But don't raise a finger at their products!!

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to troll in a Sun article, you might want to get a grip on the fact that a 2P server is not "higher end".

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're installing more new blade systems than big Sun servers.

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[pantherace]

Not so fast. Your prices are not for Xserves, so your comment is a bit misleading. The tower version is indeed $3000, but the Xserves at that price are not as fast. (see below)

Sun doesn't really have a high-end anymore.

Dual Opterons are just as fast or faster than Dual G5s, but they are selling them as low end. UltraSparcs are dreadfully slow. Any of the latest 'desktop' processors can beat them.

Heck, compared to a 8-way Opteron, an UltraSPARC would have to be MANY more processors to compete. Of course, they can have that many... it's just expensive as heck.

Power4, Opteron, G5, IA64, and SPARCV64 (Fujitsu's design, NOT sun's, though sun is going to start selling them) Are the high end processors, which have decent scaling ability & are Fast. (Certain ones IA64, are going to suck scalability wise, unless in a very custom thing like an SGI, because they have shared memory busses...still)

Here's sun's closest to an Xserve... http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v20z/

For comparison:
Sun:1.6GHz Opteron (242) 1GB RAM: $2800
Apple:2GHz G5 512MB RAM: $3000
Apple:2x2GHz G5 'Node' 512MB RAM $3000
Sun:2x1.6GHz Opteron (242) 2GB RAM: $4000
Apple:2x2GHz G5 1GB RAM $4000
Sun:2x2.2GHz Opteron (248) 2GB RAM: $5000
Apple:2x2GHz G5 2GB RAM $6700
Sun:2x2.4GHz Opteron (250) 4GB RAM: $7000

Apple doesn't win really there. Generally, Apple is a bit better price wise, but there are some differences. Suns use 10K rpm SCSI hds, vs Apple using 7200rpm Serial ATA (generally larger than the suns & 3 on the $6700 one). Also, the apples only go to 8GB RAM, vs the Sun's 16GB. Both have dual gigabit ethernet & dual pci-x slots.

They do have something in that price/performance ratio. It certainly is higher end than Apple, and the additional ram will probably mean that they will easily beat the similarly priced Apples if doing anything memory intensive.

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[Alex]

Some day your management will realize that the expensive servers they're buying really aren't worth that much. It shouldn't take that long to realize that you're paying too much for what has now become commodity hardware.

Yeah comparing a new server to a 7 year old one - one is worth f**k all, one costs a lot.

Who would have thought it!, you heard of depreciation buddy ?

Alex

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[TheLink]

"Yeah, its true that SUN's hardware is expensive... but when shit hits the fan and your server is down... and you're losing money 1000 transactions BY THE MINUTE, you really need someone to come down and save you!!"

If that's the case you may have picked the wrong solution or wrong architecture..

Sun is by no means high end or "exotic stuff" or even "overengineered". If your application is easily HA clustered then Dell etc will do just as well.

If it isn't and it's that critical maybe you should be using something like Tandem (now owned by HP), or OpenVMS (now owned by HP), both of which are targeted to run on HP's Itanium offerings (along with Windows and Linux). Or perhaps a mainframe from IBM (seems mainframes have more _scheduled_ downtime than the other two though). Then even if your server is down, the users hardly notice.

Sun's hardware is caught between the Dells and the Big Blue + HP. Sun's hardware is not mainframe class. Even Fujitsu says Fujitsu's SPARC offerings aren't mainframe class (note Fujitsu does mainframe's too, so they may be biased), just getting closer ( Fujitsu's recent SPARC CPUs have hardware instruction retry and Sun's don't).

Sun hardware used to perform decently- good bang for buck, but they are now way behind. They are now resorting to Fujitsu for SPARC CPUs (who makes arguably superior high-end SPARC CPUs and servers than Sun, but rather more expensive too...).

There are places for Sun servers, but the ecosystem is shrinking and changing.

I'm not sure what Sun should do. Maybe the Opteron thing will work. But I don't see Dell etc just standing by if Sun makes good money from it. Wonder if Dell have an "escape clause" from their contract with Intel for such situations. I bet they do.

They're not dying yet, but there are a few grim battles ahead.

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[njcoder]

"Maybe the Opteron thing will work. But I don't see Dell etc just standing by if Sun makes good money from it. "

My money's on Sun over Dell in the AMD market. I have a feeling AMD's are going to be seeing more linux and solaris than windows. When you want support for that, do you want tech support for those OS's I think more people would trust Sun over Dell.

Re:How is SUN dieing?

[jedidiah]

People that run 1000 transactions per minute (or more) aren't going to put themselves in the position of needing to be saved by Sun. No, they will implement real disaster recovery and business continuity plans that will make Sun support employees irrelevant.

You obviously don't understand the domain you're talking about. Even under the most optimistic scenario, ANY situation that would require a company to wait for Sun to get on site would cause an unnacceptable loss of business.

Therein lies the essential truth of "enterprise grade" computing. You simply cannot afford to take advantage of the warranty or of vendor support services.

Did I miss something?

[Mindjiver]

From the article :

"And thanks to a 10-year technology pact, Sun's servers will be certified to run Windows."

Windows running on UltraSPARC?

Re:Did I miss something?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be intentionlly ignorant to have missed the fact that Sun has been selling Intel and Opteron systems for a while now.

Re:Did I miss something?

[GordoSlasher]

Selling? Marketing, maybe, but I doubt they've sold very many.

Re:Did I miss something?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun bought the rights for Windows NT on Sparc -- with the goal of preventing the port from ever happening.

Sun's x86 servers are totally generic pricewatch stuff that was Windows-certified by Intel. I kinda doubt the Sparc thing had much to do with it.

Re:Did I miss something?

[jedidiah]

It will take much more than a few recent mediocre efforts to erase the history Sun has had with it's x86 based products. They need to get much more serious about x86 tech and get over their protective infactuation with sparc.

Sun's future

[Kohath]

Sun will ultimately go out of business if none of their new projects is a big success.

But they have A LOT of innovative new projects and they have the money, time, and culture to start a lot more. Betting against all of them seems unwise.

Sparc will die...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows killed Alpha. It will kill Sparc too.

So what are we doing with Sun?

[Pervertus]

They got a cool logo and lovely servers (I like the shinying sparkles on their blue covers).. but people aren't happy to buy their computers. Mostly because of their proprietary peripherals.

Think. It could be cool if you could take a SparcStation keyboard and use it in your own computer, no? But the connection is incompatible. So that might be one of their biggest problems.

Re:So what are we doing with Sun?

[christophersaul]

That's right. Only the other day I heard of the CIO of a major bank choosing a different vendor to Sun for their multi-million dollar clustered Unix systems to run their securities software. The reason? He wanted to be able to take the keyboard home with him at weekends to use on his home PC. He was also annoyed that he couldn't fix a web cam onto the Sun servers either.

Re:So what are we doing with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun is using standard USB keyboards and mice, VGA connectors, etc, for some years now.

But I really believe Sun is dying. Because it doesn't know what it wants.

Re:So what are we doing with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

"He wanted to be able to take the keyboard home with him at weekends to use on his home PC."

And the moral is the other day you heard of the CIO of a major bank who was a complete fucking idiot?

I've been using a Sun keyboard on my laptop for several years now -- that's about when they switched over to USB as the connector. Completely PC compatible, except that with Linux you can use all the extra F-keys, too.

Re:So what are we doing with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

He wanted to be able to take the keyboard home with him at weekends to use on his home PC. He was also annoyed that he couldn't fix a web cam onto the Sun servers either.

This sounds far fetched, but in case it's legit:

He ought to be fired for making decisions using those reasons. Instead of basing his decision on careful analyses, the deal breaker is a keyboard?? He is a CIO of a major bank and yet he cannot afford a $100 keyboard?? Also, if one googles for webcam solaris, one may find that there exists webcams for Solaris.

Re:So what are we doing with Sun?

[Pervertus]

Can't you see it's a joke??!?!?

Re:So what are we doing with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please post the company name so I can short the stock --- Sorry, just hint at it if you got inside info! I don't want to get 6 months at a women's minimum security prison. Isn't that what Peter Bacanovic got? ... led out of court grinning ...

Previous posters are right. The CIO is not only an idiot, but he is an idiot who doesn't do his research. You could get webcams and PC keyboards (adapters) for Sun stuff for the past decade or so. IMMSMR. Original Sun webcam was an S-bus card that took input from a cheap video cam. The hardware's a bit nicer now. Most slashdotters can't even remember those days.(except for watching Sesame Street at the time?)

The jerk doesn't even delegate his research, a.k.a. googling or cruising the sun store.

Fire him! (don't you have authority to do so?)

Re:So what are we doing with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am frightened by the # of replies to your post that seemed 100% ignorant of the fact that same post was a joke.

Jesuz, people, think!

Re:So what are we doing with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am frightened by the # of replies to your post that seemed 100% ignorant of the fact that same post was a joke."

OK, here's the problem, and this is common enough on Slashdot that I'll take the time to reply to this.

The post that everyone's flaming out on said something fairly outrageous, but said it in a way that it wasn't clear it was a joke. Heck, I was one of the ones who didn't get it, and posted a "what a moron, doesn't he know Sun keyboards work on PCs?" response.

The reason why? Because the post (9725170 - Score:3 Funny at the moment) is really only funny if you knew it was in reply to -- essentially a parody of -- a *really* lame post (9725098). But the really lame post had already been modded down to -1 by the time most of us read this thread, so no one sees it any more.

The moral? When in doubt, don't assume someone will see the post you're responding to, and QUOTE THE RELEVANT PART OF THE POST. Humor is fragile; humor out of context is just plain confusing.

Re:So what are we doing with Sun?

[anynameleft]

Wait, please don't speak about me that way. Let me explain it.

So, we have bought a couple of E25K servers a few months ago, and it occured to me that they can quite well replace the heating of our office, and because of their design they don't have to be put away into the basement.

Of course, this is not very secure (they, including the data within them, can be stolen rather easily), so therefore we have put a cluster of noname Celeron boxes running Linux in our basement. Yes, the apps we use are custom-built Sparc apps, but SparcEmu 0.6-RC2 runs them just fine. And besides that, I can't use my PS/2 keyboard on the Sun Fire, not to mention its proprietary 13W3 video connector. I mean, having bought such an expensive computer, I want to be at least able to attach my PC flatscreen and play Unreal Tournament on it!

Now that you can't play UT on it, letting those E25K servers do nothing would of course be a waste, so I thought, why not use it for monitoring the office, where they were put? So I wanted to order a few webcams, yet that DAMN PROPRIETARY SCSI-3 CONNECTOR#@&*!% NOWHERE I COULD FIND A WEBCAM HAVING IT!

maybe mcnealy is right?

[ak3ldama]

perhaps mcnealy is right and he just doesn't see how yet. mcnealy believes that the internet is waiting to buy more hardware and it just has yet to happen. i would be willing to bet he is right, but it won't happen with his high cost sparc boxes, it'll be with opteron servers running solaris ... but only if he can make it at a decent price, because nothing is stopping people from running great opteron servers with linux.

solaris not on x86?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says :"McNealy admits that his biggest regret is "not putting Solaris on [Intel's chips] six or seven years ago." "

but IIRC, Solaris x86 was around in the mid-nineties or even earlier...

Re:solaris not on x86?

[Tanktalus]

I'm still wondering why we continue to get regular (1 every 2-3 months) requests for porting our product from Sun/UltraSPARC to Sun/x86...

I'm expecting a new request any day now - it's been about 2 months since the last such request reached me, and I'm just a peon who has no control over these things.

Re:solaris not on x86?

[PrimeNumber]

Another thing the article mentioned was intels clock speeds being twice as fast as a sparc. Of course they failed to realize that sparcs have a risc architecture and a clock speed comparison between x86/sparc processors isnt really informative.
But what the hey, Businessweek is a magazine for MBAs, who never let technical facts get in the way of a good 'out of the box' synergistic read...*sigh*

Jonathon Schwartz's blog

[mqRakkis]

In related news (for real), Sun's COO Jonathon Schwartz has just recently started his blog.

Unfortunately for Sun

[xyote]

the entire tech economy is in a race for the bottom. All the companies are living off of their seed grain because they're waiting for someone else to make the first move. McNealy should be right because long term thinking should be the best strategy. But even 7 billion may not be enough to tough it out. Even Microsoft is getting worried and it has 30 billion or so.

Re:Unfortunately for Sun

[timeOday]

Even Microsoft is getting worried and it has 30 billion or so.

Why should Microsoft be worried? Unlike Sun, Microsoft is still raking in profits, so their huge pile of cash is still growing rapidly every year.

Linux is deflating Microsoft's server prospects, but not the desktop. The desktop UI improvements in Linux have been offset by the stability and performance improvements in Windows.

As a longtime Linux user (including on my desktop at work) I hate to say it but linux has plateaued. It's about as good it can be without any vendor support. We agnoize over details like whether to use multiple windows for a file manager, because the major problems are insoluble - most of the programs people use don't work on Linux, and an lot of the hardware doesn't either.

Hey! Make *me* CEO!

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing I'd do is jump into bed with Microsoft.

Even though I prefer to work with Linux, when it comes to serious back end and database processing, Big UNIX Iron is still the way to go. Linux owns the front end as far as I'm concerned, and will probably be eating Sun's, HP's and IBM's lunch in the back end in a couple of years. Given IBM's investment in Linux, they obviously know that as well.

Apparently even Microsoft can read the writing on the wall, because they're integrating SFU (Windows Services for UNIX) into Longhorn. But SFU is crap.

Make me CEO of Sun and I will make my junior execs do whatever it took to get Microsoft to integrate Solaris into Windows 2008. In the meantime, I will be delivering an interim product: SSFW - Solaris Services for Windows. I will probably have to sell my junior execs' souls to Bill, but I'll have Windows source code to get the job done.

Honestly, I don't understand the appeal of Windows. But it is undeniable... Lemmings.

I envision millions of Windows servers reliably and securely running native UNIX/Linux software side-by-side with the Windows applications that have made choosing Microsoft so easy. I see my developers sitting in Redmond cubes and Microsoft developers sitting in my bay area cubes.

With Solaris integrated into the Professional, Server, Enterprise and Data Center versions -- everything except Home Edition -- I won't charge much in the way of royalties. Single digit percentages of the MSRP will bring in vast revenues to Sun.

In return for helping Microsoft shut out HP and IBM, Bill will be obliged to help create a Solaris management user interface look and feel that mimics Windows. The next generation of sys admins will feel just as at-home on Solaris as they do on Windows.

Oh, and once a year Steve Ballmer has to come down to Mountain View and dance around screaming "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!". After all, Steve gets it!

s/ Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Microsoft.

Re:Hey! Make *me* CEO!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Honestly, I don't understand the appeal of Windows. But it is undeniable... Lemmings."


Not understanding what most people do, what's the word in the dictionary that means that? Starts with an R, it's on the tip of my tongue, anyone help me out?

Re:Hey! Make *me* CEO!

[Anonymous Coward]

Replicate?

Disappointed with SUN

[DrDebug]

The company I came to work for in 1994 was a training partner with SUN. We taught SUN classes; system admin, maintenance, some programming, etc. In 1995 Java came on the scene and we ramped up to teach that too. The demand for SUN instruction boomed so much we eventually branched out into 8 other locations around the country and the money was just pouring in. We almost had to beat back excess students with a stick. SUN also had their own training centers, but we (along with other training partners) got a lot of the overflow, or students who couldn't travel to SUN sites. (SUN did certify us as qualified instructors, if you must ask, and we often travelled to teach in their centers).

When the dot-com bust came, it came hard on training. Nobody wanted to learn any more. Most all of the training partners folded, and SUN absorbed a few of the more profitable ones for itself. Eventually, SUN divested itself of the education part and sold it off to a 3rd party named Accenture, while keeping only 3 centers for themselves (San Jose, Broomfield CO, and Burlington MA). Accenture has many of the other former SUN sites, and there are still a few struggling and starving training partners waiting for an upturn.

The demand for training is ever so slowly and painfully rising, about as fast as SUN's fortunes are now. But the heyday of the late '90s is long gone. And most of the instructors I personally knew were either released or they quit. These were some mighty bright people, too-- it was hard to see them go.

My outlook is wait and see. I myself am hibernating while teaching at a local technical college. Maybe things will get better, maybe they won't. Time will tell.

Re:Disappointed with SUN

[virtual_mps]

When the dot-com bust came, it came hard on training. Nobody wanted to learn any more.

Well, I guess that's one explanation. Another is that the "training" was never all that useful, and certainly not worth the money people were throwing at it during the 90's. Really good programmers/sysadmins/other don't come out of vendor training programs, they come from on-the-job experience. The idea that you can sit in a classroom for a week (after forking over a couple of grand) and end up with subject matter expertise is ludicrous. Yeah, it's labor intensive, difficult, and expensive to mentor people--but sending people off to a class isn't a bargain if you still need to mentor them once they get back.

Re:Disappointed with SUN

[DrDebug]

Granted, I am biased because I was a SUN instructor, but there were very few days that went by when a student didn't say something like "I never knew that". And I am not talking about the beginning classes either; this was from the more seasoned and experienced students taking advanced classes. We didn't make good programmers/sysadmins/other, but we did make them better.

Were the classes worth it? Depends on your perspective. Sure they were expensive. But they paid my light bill. SUN got a lot of cash for those who were willing to pay. And students DID come back. Often.

For some people, computers come easy and intuitively. Others can learn from a book. Others learn from online classes. And yet others learned from instuctor-led, hands on training from a qualified instructor who could answer your questions. I just don't see that last type of instruction ever going away, despite the qualities of the others mentioned.

--------

My point from the first post was that SUN wasn't just dragging itself down, but several of the companies that associated themselves with SUN.

Re:Disappointed with SUN

[dcmeserve]

The demand for [SUN] training is ever so slowly and painfully rising, about as fast as SUN's fortunes are now. But the heyday of the late '90s is long gone.

Seems like there should be demand for Linux training nowadays -- is your company diversifying into those areas? Seems like a natural transition, as most of it would be the same... :)

Opportunistic

[KernelHappy]

I was once told by someone in the top three executive tiers at Sun that they are an opportunistic company, meaning that they see a trend and jump on it. I didn't quite realize how true this was or more specifically how dangerous it was until it sank in. If you look back, they jumped on the band wagon catering to databases, then the jumped on webserver train, then they tried jumping on the low cost linux server trail, then they jumped in the Office Suite cubicle and finally grabbed onto the OSS bandwagon, each time spending more money for less or no profit. There has not been a concise vision or plan for this company for quite some time and they're paying for it now.

Unfortunately for Sun, they're not innovators and there are no current trends directly in their area for them to latch on to. Unfortunatley in lean times you need to either a) innovate and create new markets or b) produce commodity items cheaper. Neither of these things are congruent to Scott's vision or Sun's current form.

Even if Scott was to step down, what do you do with Sun? Java is not going to make it any money as a product, their in house developers are terrible and IBM has pretty much gobbled up large enterprise development market, Microsoft, agreement or not, is always looming in the corner looking to spank McNealy. If McNealy was smarter, he would have tried to be a visionary by latching onto biotech or something, developing other hardware that would leveraged his existing product base and created a reason to use his products over someone elses. But again, not innovators, regardless of how much they complain about Microsoft stiffling innovation.

Ultimately, Sun isn't quite a ship headed towards an iceberg, nor is it headed toward land. It's just circling in the middle of no where waiting for a volcano to build an island in its path.

Every ship needs to refuel at some point.

Re:Opportunistic

[Decaff]

Unfortunately for Sun, they're not innovators and there are no current trends directly in their area for them to latch on to.

Sun have always been innovators. They were the main drivers for Unix Workstations in the 1980s, they pioneered GUIs for Unix. They helped push 'open systems' in which different OS providers wrote to common APIs. They pioneered donating APIs to the community to assist with market growth (NFS is a good example). They were one of the first users of RISC. They helped make binary portability a practical reality with Java (it was not the first such system, but the first designed for the mass market). Sun is helping to establish new markets and technologies. Turn on any TV channel and you will soon hear an advert to download Java games and programs to your phone or PDA. This market is huge, and Sun gets paid for consultancy services by the companies that develop the phones. This year major car builders are working with Sun to enable the use of Java
as a real-time embedded control system. Sun get paid for this work.

Java is not going to make it any money as a product

Java is making Sun millions, through licencing, and as a mechanism for enabling Sun's recent sigificant growth as a software consultancy company.

Sun may have many flaws, but lack of innovation has never been one of them.

It's just circling in the middle of no where

Not at all. The company is changing, with a major and increasing part of its revenue and direction being nothing to do with hardware.

Re:Opportunistic

[monolith25]

This year major car builders are working with Sun to enable the use of Java as a real-time embedded control system.

It is rumored that these cars will be able to run on both diesel and unleaded fuels, but will not be able to go over ~30MPH.

Re:Opportunistic

[Decaff]

It is rumored that these cars will be able to run on both diesel and unleaded fuels, but will not be able to go over ~30MPH.

A strange thing about some geeks/nerds. They are are supposed to be a class of people who are interested in the latest developments and have an in-depth understanding of technology, yet persist in spreading FUD that has not been true for 5 years.

Java is not slow. Well, some Java is. Some C is slow. Some java GUI stuff is slow. Some C GUI stuff is slow. But, on the whole, Java is not slow. Get up to date!

Re:Opportunistic

[LuSiDe]

"it was not the first such system, but the first designed for the mass market"

That's the difference between innovation and invention. Sun didn't invent it, but Sun did innovate it (and lots of other things) succesfully.

You can make an invention or innovation which isn't popular. Doesn't say anything about the market though.

Popularity and success are however important for profit...

Re:Opportunistic

[KernelHappy]

Building GUIs for Unix systems makes them implementors not innovators. Pushing open systems makes them cheerleaders, not innovators. Opening APIs up to the public at the time is a big enough shift in thinking to qualify as innovation. Implementing RISC, I remember when RISC was gonna be the next big thing, nice to see that Sun jumped on the bandwagon by bringing it in house, we see how well it's working for them today.

Now I will give you that Java was an innovation. So here we have a case of Sun innovation and they didn't seem to know what to do with it. As far as Sun making millions on Java, in the words of Dr. Evil "Why make billions, when we can make... MILLIONS.. Muuauahahahah". Unfortunately for Sun, their business model for java was wrong, they thought they'd make it on the hardware, and while they wasted time on that front, the likes of IBM and BEA ran away with the market for consultancy services using it. Only after Sun hit the skids did they identify the trend and try to go after the pie, at this point IBM and BEA and a host of other people have longer, deeper relationships with enterprises that have a demand for those services. It was almost like Sun was so surprised that they innovated something that they didn't recognize it as a trend they could capitalize on.

Not that it is a very reliable indicator given the current state of IP law, but how many patents did Sun apply for and have granted in the past 5-10 years compared to other major players? Relatively few. A couple years ago Sun was trying to push for increased in house patent application and approval, mainly because patent granting was developing as a benchmark of innovation that showed how sorely Sun lagged behind other industry players in terms innovation.

Ultimately Sun needs more than layoffs or patents, they need a change in corporate culture and strategy. The corporate culture within Sun is the same old stodgy work flow that plagued IBM back in the 80's.

I still maintain that Sun is far from innovative and if you consider how inventive or more precisely uninventive they are it's an even bigger mystery how they survive at all.

Easy

[iamacat]

Distribute all the cash and sales proceeds from their stuff to the employees and shareholders and then just close down. Then people can get back together and do something more promising. Why let good money go to waste.

Most computers are workstations and Sun's workstations have no chance against Dell. Apple is a "higher-quality" niche player, spends good money on R&D and has a good head start. What is Sun going to offer to get even 1% of the market?

Now the problem is that people want servers to be extensions of their workstations, not something totally different. Same UI for management, interoperable applications from the same vendors, one place to call for support and so on. Windows-based servers and to some degree XServe fit this model well. I wonder how Sun will address this problem. Even IBM better make sure that their Linux servers remain cheaper/more stable than Windows. You know, you could just run Apache on Win server and firewall everything except port 80. Instant security! I am sure Linux is currently better at multitasking/SMP but on the other hand driver support sucks (want to do some server-side rendering using your ATI video card?) and Microsoft will not sit still forever on performance.

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF are you smoking? Server side rendering with your ATI video card?! Do you just make this shit up?

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Distribute all the cash and sales proceeds from their stuff to the employees and shareholders and then just close down. Then people can get back together and do something more promising. Why let good money go to waste.

Funny you say that and mention Apple in the next paragraph. Gee, didn't Dell said the same thing about Apple? Of course, if Apple had done it, there wouldn't have been PowerPC G5 (what would Xbox 2 use?), USB and WiFi wouldn't have been popularized soon, forget about iPod and iPod mini, and there whouldn't have been iTunes Music Stores too (gee, who would Napster, Coke, Buy.com, Sony copy as a model?). UNIX for the masses? Rendez-vous?

Companies' fortune goes up and down. That is normal. Being able to keep on growing (cf. Microsoft) is not normal and mostly attributable to monopoly. Take it easy, the future is not written yet. You may be right or Sun may surprise you.

Re:Easy

[iamacat]

Why do you think Java requires an X server? Rendering is rendering, and general purpose CPUs are not good at either doing it at real time, or doing lots of it for web applications. Yes you can go to SGI and get a dedicated graphics processor without a video output. But it's lots cheaper/easier to plug in a few ATI "hard core gaming" video cards, do rendering using DirectX and send output back to client in a bitmap.

Yes, I didn't actually do this kind of things myself and just summarize what I read and experienced in other aspects of "PC vs server" issues. If you have a counterexample, maybe you should invest in a free slashdot account and share it with us.

Re:Easy

[iamacat]

Apple has undergone a dramatic transformation by emphasising computers that are pleasent to use and program for, down to case design of iMac, rather than just fast. Also, they did downsize to account for 2.8% market share rather than almost a half. Fortunately for them, the total number of computer owners expanded at the same time, so they didn't have to cut as much.

Still I suspect they don't need $5B in the bank to make a profit of 12 million. Don't they get as much from interest? If they returned like $4B back to shareholders by buying back their own stock, I would be very pleased as a shareholder and not too worried as a Mac owner who wants to buy an upgrade after a few years.

Sun on the other hand, so far failed to reinvent themselves. There last innovation was Java 1.1 and they failed to profit from that for all the years they had Java. Maybe it's time to cash in the chips and go home.

SUN is going the way of....

[tsmithnj]

COBOL

They just need to take it to the next level

[Curt Cox]

Exactly. The funny thing is that Sun R&D already has research versions of WAN Ray's, software only SunRays, and the SunRay Server running on Linux. Since they have not only developed these things, but leaked them to the general public (and quite some time ago at that), I bet R&D already has prototypes of CD burners, webcams, etc... After all, current SunRays have USB. There is no reason why they couldn't move forward on this.

It is very puzzling. Sun is smart enough to see the promise in this technology, but they don't want to release the pieces that would really drive it. It seems like they fear making the SunRay a well supported open platform for fear of making it a commodity and cutting into their profit margins and sales of their other products. By keeping the platform closed, however, they are just encouraging buyers to go elsewhere.

NX is rapidly adding the features of SunRay and not stopping there. Soon there will be cheap thin-clients that support NX. If Sun doesn't start acting soon, in a few years, NX will be what SunRay could and should have been.

Re:They just need to take it to the next level

[davecb]

I suspect you're right: they've cut back on expendatures, and in so doing laid off the folks (Hi, Fred!) who could have added just those components as customer-paid specials...

--dave

New antitrust case against Intel & MSFT?

[Anonymous Coward]

If SUN goes down hard, then it will finally be time for the Justice Department to look into Intel's virtual monopoly and to revisit Microsoft's.

Strategic alliances

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I don't get about Sun is how they operate in the PC market. They got the high end, workstation market nailed down during the Internet boom, but one would realize quickly that Sun would need a strategy to deal with the PC market. PC performances approach much faster to what a workstation is supposed to be a few years ago than workstation performances do to the next level at fractions of the cost. It should have been done a long time ago. Not seeing that is pretty myopic of McNeal, I'd say.

Not only that McNeal failed to make good strategic alliances. He is too preoccupied with Microsoft. Does anyone here realize that when a company is preoccupied with MS, they lose? One loses the focus one needs to innovate and instead, tries to survive by cutting costs something the likes of Microsoft and Dell can easily deal with since they have the volume. I thought a long time ago that Apple and Sun should have made great partners since some of their philosophies were similar. But, as much as McNealy hates Gates, he views Apple-Sun alliance as cumbersome. Notice how Sun release JVM for Wintel and not for Mac OS X? Star Office for Wintel and not for Mac OS X? You'd think that when you are threatened by microsoft, you'd need as many friends as you can gather.

Re:Strategic alliances

[beakburke]

There is no Sun JVM for Apple because Sun LET APPLE WRITE THE OFFICIAL JVM FOR THIER PLATFORM.

Sigh, ok, I feel better now. :)

Some old time Corporate Values

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an employee of Sun, been so for all of the 90's and still going strong. Alot of the young people in the Industry are young high flying jump to the latest high tech startup. You think nothing of 3-4 jobs over 8 years. When you are young, you are after the big score. Some get lucky, make good contacts become high flying consultants, others like me just chug away doing our best for our employeer.

I was there when the stock quadrupled in value, split and quadrupled again and split again. I even made some money along the way. Some of our machines were big hits and we helped change the industry, if not the world in sorts.

I was also there for the big turnaround, When we, the design engineers didnt' deliver such hot products as we did in the mid 90's. There is a lot that contributed to that, but I won't go into my opinions on the matter.

I just want to say when the economy and market turned vicious on us, McNealy stood up and said "look, you guys invested alot of time in this company and brought us to where we were. Now we're here, the market isn't right, you guys have developed the best machines you could, but the market isn't right. But I'm not going to let you sit there and cry. Sun's invested alot in you, Sun's invested alot in R&D. Sun's going to protect it's investment in you and protect it's investment in R&D. You are Sun's richest resource and R&D is our future. We have umpty ump billions in the cash and we can hold out and forge ahead with no layoffs and continue our R&D".

That was before the first RIF 3 years ago. Since then Sun has had 5 RIFS and I can attest that every RIF'ed employee over that time, was RIF'ed grudgingly. Every project that was cancelled -- was done so because our executive management felt it wasn't going to meet the market demand or window. And I've no reason to doubt them. I didn't doubt them when we where high flying, and I'm not going to when times are tough.

Management that recognizes that I've made investments in them, as well as they've made investments in me and treat me like an asset -- is the type of management I want to work for.

So eat your hearts out. I work for a CEO that smart and daring and willing to take risks and make good gambles, while at the same time doing his darned best that I have a job with good benefits and strong and healthy corporate culture.

Re:Some old time Corporate Values

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so the rumour I hear from ex-employees, that there are nothing but brown-nosers left, is true.

SPARC couldn't compete

[imnoteddy]

In many ways the SPARC is technically better than the x86. Unfourtunately for Sun they don't (and never could) have the sheer volume of silicon coming out of the fabs to compete with Intel. Intel can invest huge amounts of money in design and spread the cost over many more chips. Sun's SPARC strategy was doomed.

HP recognized that they couldn't play the custom processor game and teamed up with Intel for what is now called Itanium, which has not turned out well for HP.

It remains to be seen whether IBM's POWER series can survive. IBM, unlike Sun, can at least leverage their investment with other customers such as Apple and reportedly Microsoft's XBOX 2.

Re:SPARC couldn't compete

[argent]

In many ways the SPARC is technically better than the x86..

Read as: the SPARC is such a complex design the only processor it could ever beat up was x86. Sparc was doomed when it first shipped, and the only reason it survived as long as it did was that Sun used to be able to write great software and move boxes running it.

Sort of like Apple does today.

HP recognized that they couldn't play the custom processor game

Read as: HP thought they could win the server market by buying Compaq so they could kill Alpha. Oh, sure, Alpha was EOLed before the agreement was announced, but it's not like they hadn't been talking for months beforehand.

Re:SPARC couldn't compete

[imnoteddy]

HP recognized that they couldn't play the custom processor game

Read as: HP thought they could win the server market by buying Compaq so they could kill Alpha. Oh, sure, Alpha was EOLed before the agreement was announced, but it's not like they hadn't been talking for months beforehand.

You've got the timeline wrong. HP went to bed with Intel on the processor now known as Itanium long before they bought Compaq. And Alpha, as much as it was beloved by techies, had been on life support ever since Compaq bought DEC.

Re:SPARC couldn't compete

[argent]

HP went to bed with Intel on the processor now known as Itanium long before they bought Compaq.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what your point is... I didn't say anything about HP's other custom processors. What, do you think that Intel's involvement in a processor somehow anoints it with some kind of divine virtue? Intel certainly seems to, consider their track record and their inability to learn from their own mistakes: iApx432, if not the CISCiest processor ever designed certainly on the leader board; i860, a good math engine that they decided to push as a general purpose processor; and now IA64. Intel's implementation of the architecture gives new meaning to "anemic", and if it wasn't for HP's version it'd be so doomed it'd make the i860 look healthy.

So, HP has replaced one custom processor with another, and then gone hunting for competitors. The Sparc is crippled by its goofball register model, and IBM is too big to take on, so what does that leave?

HP killed Alpha, no matter what you think the timeline is.

Java

[subStance]

Let's just hope they open source java properly before they go down the gurgler, and start having to sell their assets to stay afloat. Next time they settle with Microsoft, they might have to hand something over for their next $2 billion dollars.

Sidebar on Netra

[davecb]

The Netras where stripped units meant to be bought in dozen lots by the telcoms, who in fact bought a **ton** of them.

They resembled nexus.yorku.ca, which was a SPARC 1+ which I took the video card out of and shoved in a rack to support a large dial-in community, many moons ago (;-)) That was, you see, the way to get a small compute server cheap.

--dave

I just go to ask, what does it DO

[SmallFurryCreature]

What does looking glass DO. I seen the demo and am totally unimpressed. That CD catalog thing was just sad. Oh wow, I can see the pictures of the cd's I got in some kind of weird layout. Yeah that will show winamp. Music playing on the pc is background noise, just create a long playlist and play. Real audio fans would recoil in horror at the idea of listening to audio from a soundcard.

As for browsing music there got to be a better interface then this. I would be far more impressed with a player that can browse by mood, instruments used (In the mood for some sax right now :P) etc etc. An interface that allows me to browse cd covers on my desktop is not needed. I got the cd's, I can browse them just fine in the physical world.

The organising of windows too seemed just to be little tricks and gadgets, it been tried before and people just don't use it after the novelty wears off.

There should be a better way to organize your desktop but I seen to many of these "fancy badass" things in my past to hold out much hope. The current desktop been around a long long time and while horrible if it gets occupied I don't see this helping any. Just look at the space taken up by just 5 windows "shaded".

So exactly what functionaty does it give?

Re:I just go to ask, what does it DO

[Tim Browse]

Real audio fans would recoil in horror at the idea of listening to audio from a soundcard.

Well, as they say, the definition of an audiophile is someone who listens to the equipment and not the music.

Sun'servers will run Windows??!!

[ratboot]

"[...] McNealy and Ballmer announced the blockbuster deal. Sun would get $1.95 billion in exchange for calling off two landmark lawsuits. And thanks to a 10-year technology pact, Sun's servers will be certified to run Windows."

I got root with a noshell bug.

What "Sun is dying" article?

[revscat]

RTFA. It doesn't talk about Sun "dying", but about it's decline into near irrelevance. To quote:

Six years later, as the boom of the late 1990s came to a crashing end, Wall Street had more advice for McNealy: Batten down the hatches for the storm ahead; slash research; lay off staffers; and get serious about low-cost products. Once again, McNealy held his ground. But this time, he was dreadfully wrong. Sun's sales have tumbled 48% in the past three years, it has lost a third of its market share -- and it continues to head south even as its rivals ride the economic recovery. Its stock, which reached $64 in 2000, trades at about $4. No other major player has been weakened as much during the tech downturn. "Right now it looks pretty grim," says Geoffrey A. Moore, author of several tech-industry books, including Crossing the Chasm.

Sun may die or it may not, but this article is primarily focused on McNealy's role in his company's decline in the marketplace.

Blame Apple

[Matthias Wiesmann]

I think the reason why see those Sun is dying articles is because the 'Apple is dying' articles are starting to be really difficult to take seriously.

Actually, the article is eerily similar to the 'Apple should have' articles. Basically, what was done wrong was to try to do new things, invest in research. Instead the company should have built wintel boxes like Dell and fired a maximum of people.

How many companies have been successful in imitating Dell except Dell?

Re:Blame Apple

[tonyr60]

"I think the reason why see those Sun is dying articles is because the 'Apple is dying' articles are starting to be really difficult to take seriously."

And what about SGI. It was supposed to have died years ago, nearer death than Apple actually, but it still seems to be surviving fairly well, albeit a bit smaller than it has been

Re:Blame Apple

[platypus]

But you must admit,

it took 2 or really positive events (or maybe masterpieces of the applemanagement, if you like) that apple didn't get into deep shit. iMacs, G5, and iPod come to mind.

If Sun pulls something out of their hat, the same might happen. The difference is that MS or IBM don't need that to keep afloat.

Re:Blame Apple

[jcr]

The difference would be that Apple's R&D, for the most part, comes up with good products, and the ones that don't make the grade don't get announced, let alone shipped.

A company like Sun or MS can spend any amount of money on R&D, but they just don't get how to filter the great ideas from the mediocre ones.

-jcr

Re:Blame Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Good god.

You should check out the Computer History Museum. It's in SGI's old headquarters.

My office is in a former SGI building. We refer to the buildings that SGI still has as the 'legacy campus'.

SGI is barely hanging on thanks to government contracts, but it is far from a major force in technology or business anymore.

Re:Blame Apple

[Matthias Wiesmann]

The difference would be that Apple's R&D, for the most part, comes up with good products, and the ones that don't make the grade don't get announced, let alone shipped.

Have you heard of Opendoc? Copland? Quickdraw GX? Quickdraw 3D? The Apple clones? The Dylan language?

Apple had more of its shared of failed project, shipped or not. Many of those ideas were great, and failed, not so much because of their shortcoming, but because they came at the wrong time, or where not marketed correctly. In fact elements of those failed projects are often reappearing in Mac OS X.

The problem is not so much coming out with good ideas, but to manage to sell them...

Sun *is* doomed

[Devil]

Ultimately, Sun is doomed. It has carved itself out a niche between IBM's big-iron machines and Dell's cheap-iron ones, but the gap in which Sun lives is rapidly narrowing. Even Apple is taking sales away from them, and if that happens, you know you're in trouble. As for Java...well, it's a good language and portable, too, but the coming onslaught of .NET is only going to hurt Sun more.

This means that Sun no longer has an edge it can use to drive a wedge between Dell, Microsoft, Apple and IBM, all of whom are rapidly closing in on it like a pack of wolves. Ultimately, Sun will go the way of Netscape (except that in Sun's case, it will be the rest of the industry crushing them instead of just MSFT). If they're smart, they'll open-source Java, because that's the only way I can think of for there to be something left of them once the company is gone.

Just hire more Israelis and Indians!

[Baldrson]

"I am fighting with our government to allow H1B visas cap to be raised. I was in at the White House talking to the chief of staff to get the H1B visa cap raised. We already half way through the fiscal year, capped out on the number of really bright Israelis and Indians."

-- Scott McNeally September 2000 after the dot-con implosion was already in full swing.

Sun Erie-Bucyrus?

[crovira]

I'm just waiting for the inevitable comparison of a company that went higher and higher up-market until there was nowhere to go.

In the meantime, the lower, broader-based competition ate their potential market by coming out with new competitively attactive, but not forward looking, product.

So called innovators in computing are just commiditizers. The difference is that now the time gap between innovation, read profit, and commodity , read cheap-ass knock-off, is shrinking (which USED to be the purpose of a patent system.)

Sun is not a viable company in the long term unless the do what Apple did and head in another direction.

Just how it is.

[ShadowRage]

yeah, It's like how we get a monthly, or bi-monthly apple troll article. like the one yesterday.

You know why the most negative news always comes in the most? because people are cynical depressed bastards in all honesty.

and to make their lives a little more exciting, they have to have bad news, or bad news about someone else having trouble. That's why your local news ALWAYS has something about children getting raped, people getting kidnapped, soldiers being beheaded, detah, destruction, murder, pain, sadness.. and they get a lot more damn ratings that way, society is sick in all honesty.

Notice positive news articles (not just on slashdot) never get as near the amount of comments as really bad news? an example from slashdot, when SCO shit comes up, or impending doom to linux comes up, there are near a thousand comments or more. Something about an advancement or something good, there arent as many posts, and the posts that are there are cynical posts most of the time, or how it isnt a good move, etc. with very little up posts.

It's just a rule of thumb with people.

What in the name of all that is good and holy...

[randombit]

From article: And thanks to a 10-year technology pact, Sun's servers will be certified to run Windows.

Ummmm... what the fuck? I've got to assume this is just plain wrong, since it seems to imply either that MS will be porting Windows to SPARC, or that Sun is dropping SPARC, or something like that. Maybe they just mean the Opteron and x86 based systems? If so, not exactly a huge deal, especially considering that Sun's x86 stuff is just the same as stuff you can get from HP or Dell, just with a Sun logo.

just enjoy the toy's

[QAChaos]

I don't understand why everyone spends so much time criticizing sun's marketing practices! they have a great download section that has some of the coolest free toys to play with! QA K

HP and IBM will eat them

[gelfling]

SUN doesn't have a service provider arm or partnerships with network providers or management providers. Nor do they have a Gigundo systems management suite like Tivoli or CA or HPOpenview.

Therefore they will fail.

Let's be honest

[williewang]

Sorry for the potential troll, but who really likes working with Solaris (not including all those guys out there scared shitless because they make money by being Solaris admins)? Yes, Solaris is extrememly robust, very stable, threads very well, etc. The problem is that almost nobody cares.

Opensource handles server applications very, very well. Additionally, opensource applications/libraries/compilers, are developed on (gasp!) opensource operating systems. Further still, the opensource applications/libraries/compilers are exactly what many, many people want. So, reasonably, most developers and sysads don't feel it wise to use anything other than opensource operating systems.

Solaris makes sense in certain environments, no doubt--but not many. That is the point. For a massive metadirectory, sure, go Solaris on a E6K or something, for most everything else, don't. Linux and *BSD can take care of 99% of your enterprise needs for a fraction of the cost, a wider user base, more international development, more usability, less dependancy problems, etc. etc.

Yahoo, Google, Pair Networks, etc, don't use opensource because it sucks, but because it works well and fits their business model. SUN may well be around for a while, but only if no one wants to buy them.

Some kind of revenge, seeing them sink...

[tchernobog]

He has upset a lot of us Free Software and OpenSource users, by declaring things like "we like this revolution, it is a big thing, but we're not on this train". Not to mention that horrorific non-free Microsoft-filled JavaDesktop.
If you upset your own potential users, as well as a lot of your potential developers (!), don't come back begging for some money to resurrect the Evil Empire of Sun.

So, Sun wants to be innovative....

[zogger]

Do something different, shake up things, come up with a new model? They want to provide free semi big iron boxes with a software subscription plan? Swell, where's the desktop version of this? THAT would shake up the ole computar whirrled! Give me a new desktop every year, plus the OS where everything works and it doesn't suck, and I can just keep paying the fee, maybe I would consider that. Buck a day maybe to always have a new computer and OS every year? Just turn in the old one and they send you a new one? Warranty, updates, firewall and antivir that works? Full legal media playback without having to jump through hoops? Star Office and all the other stuff included? Their Java/SuSe desktop? Personal or SOHO or enterprise desktop/workstation? Let's see it, THAT would be innovative!

Sun is dying because

[Anonymous Coward]

Their SPARC processor sucks compared to Intel/AMD/IBM. So now they need to compete with IBM/HP/DELL and can't rely on their former software monopoly in Solaris apps since the apps are being ported to linux.

Save it for Queen Doppelpoppolus!

[I judge you]

I work in an environment that has roughly 4k+ UNIX servers, 90% of them are ALL SUN. I don't see them going away anytime soon. More Slashdot FUD Please.....

So you are saying that your subjective non-expert view of one sample point in one part of the market is important enough to make sure judgements on the future of a $12.3B company?

Re:Save it for Queen Doppelpoppolus!

[Dillusionary]

And do you have anything to say about this subject other then that? Do you have any expertise in this department? Have you worked in any company that has this large of an UNIX installation? And for the record, we are still buying SUN servers. Mr "I judge you". Bright, come back again when you understand wtf you are talking about.

Re:Sun Erie-Bucyrus?

[argent]

Apple has stopped heading higher and higher up-market?

Since when?

When (if?) the giant falls...

[Tragek]

I hope the last thing they do will be to open up everything. I mean put everything under the GPL, or public domain it. I wonder if sun could create a will.....

McNealy: "PCs and Linux ate my shorts"

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect my story isn't that much different from a bunch of /. readers:

I work at a U.S. Government lab. Starting 11 years ago our Section's main product, a huge image processing package used at the lab and elsewhere, was originally ported from VMS to UNIX - first to SunOS 4, then of course to Solaris 2 and IRIX and HP-UX.

Over time, the IRIX and HP-UX ports were dropped due to lack of demand, and of course sooner or later a Linux port emerged as we saw demand for it from our customers. In the course of these 11 years we've gone from being a mostly-Sun shop with an SGI or 3 and an HP-UX box to having probably tripled or quadrupled in size - with mostly Linux servers and Linux-based RAID boxes nowadays, with the remainder being Suns (and 2 Xserves).

To me, Linux on commodity PCs is the Windows of the server room - it's not necessarily the prettiest, it's not necessarily the most robust (we're having problems with our 3Ware/Linux-based RAID boxes losing power supplies - gee, our NetApp never did that), but it's the cheapest and it "works well enough" for most needs that it's the clear default choice unless requirements dictate that we need something bigger.

5 years ago we went through a "Desktop replacement" where we replaced everyone's SPARCstation 10's and 20's with Ultra 5's. Some of those boxes are still in daily use now. But in the meantime, everyone's gotten their own PC or Mac on their desk as well. It's time to get rid of the Ultra 5's for good, and our solution was - don't replace them at all, just get rid of them.

So, we're moving to a server farm based solution - you want to build your Solaris port of your code? OK, log onto our server farm, run it there, if it's X, run it there and pop the window back up on your Mac running OS X's X11 or on your PC running Hummingbird or whatever, we don't care. We started looking into the Grid Engine stuff, but it's too loosely-coupled for this kind of thing - we want the rack of SunFire V240's to look like one computer for "logging into Solaris", as viewed from the desktop, and we were shocked to learn that our Sun software field engineer had never heard of Sun Cluster being used in such a manner - what, you mean you're not running some "service" that needs to be persistent and HA? You just want all these machines to look like a single Black Box? It totally threw him off ... there's some feedback for you, Mr. McNealy.

Anyway ... McNealy should've seen this coming, once NT boxes started eating SGI's shorts. It was clear that as soon as PCs and even Macs started to leap-frog UltraSPARC in the performance dept. that his on-the-user's-desktop Workstation business was toast, and that low-end much-cheaper PCs that ran anything close enough to Solaris (read: Linux) to "get the job done" ("works well enough") would eat his shorts in the low-end server dept.

People don't have allegiances to companies - they have allegiances to solutions that have software that "works well enough" and at the lowest price point where they can achieve their goals, hardware and software-wise. In that sense, I don't think McNealy could've done much - there's simply no way he could compete with the oncoming PC/Linux juggernaut. It satisfies peoples' base requirements too well now. He can't compete with Dell in price because of margins and their off-the-shelf-ness.

What annoys me about the article itself, however, is that it lays the blame at McNealy's feet for all of this - not once does it really get into the whole issue of what the *customers* want, what the customers (of all computer vendors) decided they wanted to buy. The article (as they all do) spends too much time talking to ex-company execs and analysts - what was there, maybe one quote from an IT manager?

In other words, the article seems to be all about how Scott f****ed up - but to me, from where I sit, the vast majority of the reasons for why things are the way they are were things that were beyond Scott's

not sun's fault...nuh-huh!

[Anonymous Coward]

therefore decided to blame the vendor

yup, and its everyone elses fault except sun that nobody understands them. so what if marketing lies? every marketing weasel lies!

so what if theyre overpriced? gotta pay those bloated six-figure geek paychecks and god forbid a geek actually have to do clerical tasks like run the photocopier and vacuum up their own cubical. wait, did i say cubical? horrors, not here at sun! as if you can drink catered starbucks in a cubical anyhow, haha.

yup, keep pinning it on the stupid customers. damn, if sun could just get rid of all its customers, work would be fun again. hey, you might just get your wish!

You got it wrong, buddy

[Anonymous Coward]

Most republicans/conservatives are against illegal immigration and want to close up the borders. It's the democrats/liberals that are screaming bloody murder/racism when anyone brings up this topic

Re:You got it wrong, buddy

[Centinel]

Most republicans/conservatives are against illegal immigration and want to close up the borders.

The national GOP leadership wants to duck the immigration issue because Wall Street Republicans and neocon pundits--the people with money--want lax immigration policies.

It's little people with less influence in the GOP who want immigration reform.

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), the most vocal opponent of illegal immigration in the House, has been warned by the White House's Karl Rove over breaking with Bush's "moderate" stance on immigration as Bush panders for the hispanic vote. The national GOP has even threatened to run a candidate against Tancredo in the next primary election.

Thing is, the Mexicans tend to vote Democrat for statist social services, which has led paleo-conservative pundit Samuel Francis to brand the GOP "the Stupid Party" since they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction by not cracking down on illegals while alienating their grassroots Middle America voters who will sit out this election in protest.

Sun Has Java!!

[Black-Man]

IBM and BEA can make tons of money supporting Java with tools and services, whereas Sun has yet to figure it out. Of course, look at some of their tools and you see why they are in the shape they are in.

Maybe if they would buy a small Java toolset/services company and build on that, they could right themselves. But that high-margin big iron is hard to ween oneself of.

Re:Sun Has Java!!

[Bruce Perens]

This is another area where I feel Sun needs to get a clue. It's very difficult to make money with systems software when the best people in the business are giving it away. You need to put your value way high up the stack, and keep moving.

Bruce

Golden Rule

[Anonymous Coward]

On a serious note, why is it that CEOs are rewarded very handsomely for poor performance and failure when the rest of us get fired when we don't get the job done, or even are perceived as not being value for money?


Um, it's called the "Golden Rule". And no, don't get confused by the stupid ass Jesus one either.

Where is VMS?!

[garyisabusyguy]

Why, it's inside of every Storageworks that DEc, um, Compaq, um... I mean HP sells... They still call the controller an HSC-XXX (That's Hot Shit Controller, for you non-DECies) OpenVMS Duh!

Bizweek and Open Source

[calidoscope]

One of BizWeek's crusades with Sun is "drop Solaris for Linux" claiming that will save a lot of R&D money. BizWeek misses the point in three major areas - one is that there would still be a need for R&D to support the hardware - the second is that Solaris already leverages off of open source code (e.g. Gnome) - and the third is that there is a lot more to open source than Linux (e.g. BSD) - I wonder if Sun is more afraid of OpenBSD than Linux.

I don't remember reading much about OpenOffice.org in BizWeek.

In regards to another posting of yours: 60 bits > 36 bits (clue: what hardware ran SCOPE for an OS)

Re:Bizweek and Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wonder if Sun is more afraid of OpenBSD than Linux."

I wonder where you buy crack so cheaply!

Re:hahha w0000t FP

[Anonymous Coward]

wedding hazelnuts!

Wala

[mparaz]

Wala means 'nothing' or 'none' in Tagalog. Maybe that's what he meant.

What goes around comes around: a scab's fate

[labourstart]

What people haven't commented on in the Business Week piece is the detail from Scott McNealy's biography -- when he crossed a United Auto Workers picket line during a strike.

According to the article, "One summer, he worked in an auto-parts factory. When the United Auto Workers at the plant went on strike, McNealy didn't think twice about crossing the picket lines -- despite bomb threats and jeers from angry union members. 'It seemed incredibly stupid,' he said. 'I couldn't see how highly paid UAW workers were helping their cause' by losing the company money."

The young Scott McNealy showed the same kind of arrogance, short-sightedness, and contempt for others way back then that he has shown now. That attitude, which led him to scab on fellow workers, is the same attitude that drove a once-great company like Sun into the ground.

Re:What goes around comes around: a scab's fate

[Anonymous Coward]

drove a once-great company like Sun into the ground.

Oh, you betcha. During Scott's tenure as CEO, Sun has plummeted from $n million to $11 billion. Oops, could be we got the sign flipped here...

The fact that Sun hit $18B in between is pretty cool, too. Not so cool that it's gone back down, but the point is that McNealy took a company that had to claw their way to win one bid against Computervision in order to even survive, and made it into a company that's changed the way the industry thinks (do you think IBM would be spraypainting penguins on sidewalks if they didn't have to compete against Sun? Would Microsoft have C-sharped if Sun hadn't Java-ed?), and is routinely mentioned in the same breath as HP and IBM, two companies that have been around for a lot longer.

Speaking of HP and IBM, both have had their "well, that about wraps it up for them" moments, and both have survived and thrived.

You may be justified in scorning his "scabbery" (they guy was the son of an auto industry VP, after all), but if you refer to Sun having been great, remember, that's been under Scott's watch, too.

Different market?

[LuSiDe]

I'm not really into the subject and this may sound stupid but i read several statements R&D is strong at SUN. Why don't they use this as a service for other companies? Then they don't really have to take into account how good other similar products and SPARC lives on.

ill-informed?

[alexq]

All of Sun's competitors -- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), IBM (IBM ), and Digital Equipment Corp. -- were busy developing new servers to run the next version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software. Wall Street pundits begged McNealy to show some common sense and do the same. But he refused, instead cranking up his investment in Sun's own software, called Solaris. What happened next made McNealy look brilliant. Rivals couldn't match the speed, reliability, and security of Sun's servers.

Is this really true? From my knowledge, all of these competetitors also offerred and promoted their unix workstations (HPUX/Digital Unix/Tru64/AIX) as well, and DEC never even really released anything AlphaNT that _really_ worked well, did they? This is a pretty weird statement to me.

Re:ill-informed?

[Anonymous Coward]

"'All of Sun's competitors -- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), IBM (IBM ), and Digital Equipment Corp. -- were busy developing new servers to run the next version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software.'"

"Is this really true?"

Mostly true. The climax of this was when everyone locked into "Merced" (now of course Itanic) as the only true chip of the future. HP was about to drop all UNIX and HP-PA projects, DEC had of course drunk the Koolaid and was going to do WinNT on Alpha as well; only IBM was maybe a little less gung-ho, but was still lined up in the Merced camp.

Even Sun had announced Solaris for Merced, although Intel cooled that off not too long after when they realized Sun *wasn't* going to drop SPARC at the same time.

Re:ill-informed?

[alexq]

around what year was this all supposed to have happened...?

My junk room of Sun

[ic0wb0y]

Sun costs more, not just in equipment. I use real estate up just devoting a perfectly good storage space to store the most beautiful and extensive collection of Sun crap that can't be used with new high-end applications anymore. I bet my little ol' closet contains a half $mil worth of slick looking machinery, all with Sun logo's on it.

Long-distance burgers

[FreckledGruntBuggly]

You think so? Why are the burgers cold these days? Answer, the five-thousand miles of pneumatic tubing isn't all well insulated. And when CERN get their (McDonalds funded) matter transportation system fixed they'll be golden. Problem is, at present the burger sometimes finishes up wrapped around the bread, and a few excess vitamins are still getting through the filters.

It's funny

[einhverfr]

I just had a discussion with my father (independent of this article which I haven't read yet) about the Fall of Sun. In my opinion, I can say that Sun is dying because their only profit over the last two years has been exclusively due to their settlement with Microsoft. While that buys them some time, I am not sure that there is any reason to think that they are healthy.

As for Apple, they have had many tough times, and Steve Jobs is generally credited with saving the company after he was re-hired. This tells me that Apple has almost died at least once. And time was when both Apple and Sun shared the same outdated business model, but not any more. Apple has now more or less cornered the online music industry with the iTunes and the iPod, and they have begun to leaken the level of vertical integration in their business by moving not only to an open source kernel but basing it on an existing open source kernel (Mach). But they were never as fully vertically integrated as Sun in that they have never been the sole manufacturer of their main chips. Apple used to be in Sun's position but they have successfully transitioned away from it. I expect to see more open source software coming from Apple in the future as they determine which portions of their operating environment are disposable to them further breaking up their vertical integration.

Sun OTOH, is in a very precarious position. IMO, they are doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing, and the exact opposite of what the other major UNIX vendors are doing. The problem is that R&D are the main expense of building microchips, enterprise systems, and operating systems. The fewer units you sell, the more each unit costs. So because of this, Windows and Linux on Intel have been slowly encroaching on the UNIX/RISC market. This causes a massive problem, where the reduced market increases the cost, which reduces the size of the market...

Personally, I am not of the opinion that Sun should be shipping Wintel boxes, like, say, Dell, but they need to have a strategy for dispersing as much of this R&D expense as possible. SGI and IBM have been putting a lot of work into ensuring that Linux will run on their enterprise systems, thus breaking this vertical integration and ensuring that they will not bear the entire cost of OS development. IBM has also developed a large variety of CPU's and at least one (PowerPC) of these had its R&D costs spread between two other vendors.

This leaves the cost of engineering the enterprise system which is not going to be decentralized anytime soon and so is safe to hold on to.

Sun has generally responded hostilly toward the idea that Linux should replace UNIX in the data center on enterprise hardware and has publically attacked IBM for this strategy even before IBM admitted that this was their strategy. Sun's strategy is to offer Linux servers and workstations which are small, and Solaris systems which are large in order to make the Solaris systems more attractive. The problem with this strategy is that it merely prevents Sun from further dispersing its cost of OS development. Similarly their gratis licensing of the operating system for systems with fewer than 8 CPU's effectively cuts their market size.

In general, Sun seems bound and determined to make their enterprise systems as expensive as possible. Unfortunately this is not a way to compete.

BTW, Sun in this case represents a great example of the dangers inherent in the tremendous economy of scale that affects the software industry. What goes for Sun in this case could easily go for Microsoft as Linux continues to encroach upon Microsoft's markets.

Neither Sun nor Microsoft are about to go out of business, but I think it is fair to say that Sun's current business model is proven ineffective. Who knows what Sun will look like when they finally transition.

Montana Power Company no longer generates electricity but rather builds computers.

Nokia no longer builds cars, though I think they still manufacture tires.

Businesses have a funny way of surviving in strange and unrecognizable ways.

Great point but...

[einhverfr]

I think there is a reason why Open Source is so much better and more admin-friendly than most of the proprietary UNIX's. THis is because the cost of development is much more widely distributed, and often people will add features which save them time, headaches, etc. because they can (this is a form of cost decentralization becuase the developer is paying for a feature that he or she wants).

BTW, I have only let one person who thought Solaris was easier to use than Linux. Almost everybody else I have met seems to feel that it is extremely hard to administrate properly in comparison to Linux because the interfaces are not often as generic and so require more research.

I would be willing to get that AIX, Irix, etc. are the same way. I know every version of SCO UNIX I have tried was.

In generally, I think that Linux will continue to build and develop market share and will cause the collapse of Sun until the company either goes out of business or reinvents itself. Then we will see the same tidal wave progress until it goes up Ship Canal, across Lake Union and Lake Washington, and overtakes Microsoft.

With the proprietary OS market destroyed, the BSD;s will also thrive, grow, and prosper, btw. Only the proprietary OS's are susceptible to the commoditizing power of Linux.