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

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.

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: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: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: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: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! :-)

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

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 ...