New Hopes From Sun's Idea Factory

UltimaGuy writes "While it's way too soon to say Sun is back on track, the return of Bechtolsheim, aggressive improvements in products and a healthy dose of humility among Sun's executives mean the troubled company and its investors have more cause for optimism than they've had in years." Of course, Sun's problems are still out there - dealing with projects like Geronimo for some of their base infrastructure, and of course other companies promoting Linux as the solution.

Comments

Re:Back On Track?

[jamesgamble]

A good stock price and progressive growth can mean a company is "back" to investors. Good support of its user base and new products and services help to show users that a company is "back". I think the second area is where Sun is/was lacking, and I believe that's what this article was making reference to. :)

Re:Thank the DoD

[twiddlingbits]

Really? The HUGE amount of Sun servers I've seen in Corp. Data Centers don't count? If the DoD props up anyone it is Silicon Graphics. Talk about proprietary everything.

SUN is setting....

[katorga]

I'm a long time Sun user from sparc1 thru my current F15s, and I think its over. Sun is starting the long decline so familiar to the workstation vendors. Think HP PA-RISC and SGI. Basically, I bought SUN to stay 5 years ahead of the PC technology curve.

Sadly, Sun could not maintain the technology lead and as they move to x86 servers, the argument that low cost x86 systems are 90% as good for half the price starts to be felt. I pay a premium to be ahead of the curve.

OSS is going to canibalize Sun on the software side unless they become a services and integration company of OSS stacks.

Re:Thank the DoD

[ForumTroll]

As a developer I find the complete opposite. I would much rather work with Solaris (or BSD) in a server environment than any other OS. I've had no problems finding binary versions of any packages and even if I did it's not like compiling from source is a problem.... Dependency problems happen no where near as often as they do in Linux and generally they can be resolved very easily if you know what you're doing. As to your admins blindly installing Sun updates, this speaks more about the quality of your admins than it says anything about Sun. No updates for any OS are perfect especially when you're admins just "blindly install" them.

It's interesting how you didn't touch on any of the good aspects of Solaris that can't be found in any other OS. Perhaps, if you look at some of the internals of Solaris you would see why the DoD is using it.

Re:Hardware

[linguae]

They need to reinvent themselves as an end-to-end solutions provider for Linux and dump (or at least really heavily de-emphasize) the rest. Forget about OpenSolaris - salvage what little is still worth anything in Solaris, GPL it and help integrate it into Linux. Stop designing, making and selling new SPARC hardware - give the platform to Fujitsu or Toshiba or whoever is stupid enough to want it. Focus entirely on making the best AMD64-based servers money can buy. Become the new high end of the Linux server market. Be the vendor that can sell you the complete package. Have support techs that know more about Red Hat than Red Hat.

Great, we'll just lose some more operating system and (especially) platform diversity. OpenSolaris is the best thing that can happen to Solaris, and I would like to see more competition between Solaris, Linux, and BSD (because competition leads to more innovation between the three OSes). There are many nice things and advantages to the Solaris platform that Linux could learn from. Besides, Solaris is a real Unix (based off AT&T Unix System V), whereas Linux is just a clone. Why would Sun drop something based on the real thing for an imitation? If Sun were to drop anything, I'd rather Sun adopt Plan 9 rather than Linux. At least Plan 9 is unique and different.

And with the SPARC platform, why would Sun drop that elegant platform for the inferior x86-64 architecture? (Don't get me wrong, I like the AMD64 a lot, but it is still based on that hideous x86 architecture, and the SPARC is much better designed). Over the past few years, we have lost a few well-designed platforms (Alpha, PA-RISC, PowerPC) to the x86, and the SPARC is the last holdout. I do not want to see an x86 monopoly on computing, but it looks like were heading for that. And when we're stuck with the x86 as our only platform, then innovation will slow down, and we might not see better platforms again.

Sun should continue what it has been doing; be a Unix company selling a Unix variant and workstations, and promoting Java (let's not forget that important part of Sun). We don't need another Linux PC manufacturer. If Sun degenerated to just selling Linux PCs, then Sun would die faster than you can say a BSD or Apple troll.

Re:Hardware

[shmlco]

Forgive me, but that's a dumb solution. They're well known in the high-end market, and they're pretty busy mixing up new batches of Kool-Aid.

Your solution, however, would end up positioning them as yet another Linux X86 harware integrator in a commodity market, with little or no competitive advantage. And as much as Linux would like to think it's up to Solaris standards... it's not.