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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."
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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).
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.
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?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
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.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
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...
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!!
- mritunjai
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?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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?
"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.