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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.
I dunno if I'd count jumping on the Linux/Open Source bandwagon "back on track" or not...I'd like to see some new ideas from them, but I haven't seen anything original yet, besides, perhaps, using AMD in a big way.
good thing, especially since Sun is not going to fuck with StorageTek, they're going to run it as a separate division of the company and start selling StorageTek storage products with Sun servers and close out Sun's line of storage products (which were just rebranded from Hitachi and other vendors anyway). Sun's storage offerings were overpriced and underwhelming, with StorageTek in house they have a good thing becuase regardless of what platform wins out in the future (Linux, Solaris, Solaris x86, Windoze, Plan 9) people are going to need lots and lots of storage space for their pr0n, warez and MP3, oops, I mean corporate data. Now if Sun can only get rid of the shit ugly purple and grey color scheme they have on the Sparc boxen they might be able to stage a huge comeback.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
They want to be a solutions provider - hardware, software and support. But their Kool-Aid is getting pretty stale. Their own platforms (Solaris and SPARC) are increasingly viewed as legacy stuff.
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.
But it won't happen, or it'll happen too little too late, because they have too much money, pride and identity invested in the legacy crap. What a waste.
fnord.
the start to great things for Sun. Right now, all they've announced is some small things like buying each other's stuff and including the Google Toolbar with JRE downloads. But if you think about it, who has Google announced a partnership (other than the AOL deal last week which was mainly a defensive move against MS)? So you really have to take this partnership seriously. Now, with Google Wi-Fi rolling out, what's the next thing for Google to offer? Well, what about Sun-Ray's? It might not be possible to offer a Sun-Ray that connects over Google Wi-Fi for free right now, but in 5 - 10 years it will be (Moore's law makes hardware about 30% cheaper every year). I believe Google will wait until the hardware is cheap enough to be funded by advertising and give it away. The question is which hardware will they use. Clearly with this partnership announcement, Sun's Sun-Ray platform has taken the lead.
No Sigs!
Bah. There are plenty of Sun boxes in the private sector. If I walk around our floor at the colocation facility I can see a dozen cages for large companies. There are more then 500 computers total. Half of them are Sun machines.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I will always have a soft corner in my heart for sun. Sun's java language made it possible for many developers from developing countries to compete in the commercial software market. Free JAVA meant that it was easy to learn the language. No question that the open-source tools like tomcat were the other barrier breakers.
Sun always had been a company with a scoial conscience, dontaing hardware and software to colleges all over the world. It is nice that they have finally accepted the market trends (like x86) and decided to go with them.
Besides, Solaris is a real Unix (based off AT&T Unix System V), whereas Linux is just a clone.
What meaning does this statement have at the end of the day ? Why do I care about an operating system's pedigree ? Either it does what I want, or it does not. In fact, it seems pretty silly to market something solely on the basis that it still has ten year old bits of code floating around in it.
If Sun were to drop anything, I'd rather Sun adopt Plan 9 rather than Linux. At least Plan 9 is unique and different.
"unique and different" are two words which describe Microsoft. I wonder why their way of doing things appeal to you ? It may have escaped you that people want things that are standard and interoperable. I want to choose between vendors or open source products that just work. I don't want to see the wheel re-invented each go-round.
the SPARC is much better designed
The term "better designed" means nothing. Will it allow me to do my job better, or not ? Sure, x86 is a heap of shit. But if it performs better, why should I care ?
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.
Why are you so convinced that the world will reject a "better platform" ?
We don't need another Linux PC manufacturer.
There is no such thing as too much competition. Sun's hardware is among the best there is.
Frankly, while those recommendations may improve your chances, I still think Sun's future is bleak. Sun got big early on because they sold cheap machines with software that did stuff nobody else did, and they sold it to people like me who then, for about a decade, were loyal customers. But all of that is history. If Sun doesn't want to disappear completely, they still need a better strategy than selling Opterons.
Who cares about some "PC technology curve"?
What really is important is the performance, power consumption, and price at which you can accomplish your computing goals. The Operton's have a great balance of all three factors and Sun is packaging, yes PACKAGING, some great hardware at a great price and very low power consumption in their x86 line. Who really cares if Sun has the chip designed/made from scratch when at the end of the day all you really should care about is results and not who made your machine so you can brag about it.
If you really think you need Sparc, you could likely double your power by using Sun's high-quality x86 products in place, such as their amazing quad dual-core Opteron V40z servers.
For the record, I have a Sun W2100z x86 Opteron system but could care less about having Sparc as the current equipment is more than capable and provides excellent performance at a fraction of the cost of Sparc for my use. Sparc certainly is a great product and I welcome it and wished it were the standard instead of x86, but until that is ever realized, I'm simply results oriented.
The apparent x86 motto: "Do more with less" [you define 'less']
The apparent Sparc motto: "Work smarter, not harder" [and anyone/thing smart always costs more]
Not just that, but some suggest Sun's new servers are also designed to be used by Google, which if I recall correctly, has over 100,000 estimated servers.
Sun is also on the right track to target Developers with their very affordable Ultra 20 in addition to their higher performing, and more costly, workstations.
However, the tide seems to be turning a little. While Management has been sucking up to Dell and Microsoft, our little trench workers are learning and liking Linux. The AMD Galaxy boxes from Sun (specifically the 4200) have our manufacturing folk interested. Cost is good. Redundant power supplies with separate power to each. Solaris 10, Redhat, SuSE, and Windows support. Way faster (seriously... quite a bit) than comparably priced servers from Dell. You mileage may vary, but our use of them for our CPU intensive tasks look promising. Reliability yet to be determined.
Gone are the days of Veritas and Sun Clustering. The NetApps cover the file storage, and the Sun Galaxy may be the CPU to run our stuff. However, I don't see where Sun is going to get rich off the new hardware. They used to soak us for support. Our dept stopped forking over money for that years ago and took care of it themselves. I don't see Sun making money without extensive support contracts... but the blindly paid-for support contracts of old have dried up. I own Sun stock and am upside down in it. Here's to hoping that it will turn around.
Alright, while I don't pretend to downplay the genious of a company who has always grabbed headlines since the inception of computing as we know today, there are more issues than innovation in which a CTO must underwrite. Trust is an important factor. How does Sun gain the trust of our CTO's? In today's "You better get it all done with this much money and have 99 percent uptime or it's YOUR ass" CTO job descriptions, CTOs get much more sleep at night on non SUN solutions. We once had sun replace a systemboard on a very expensive SUN server 21 times before this server was usable again. I think this marked a turning point with us (IBM's largest customer) and we were far more apprehensive towards this company from that series of moments on. I could go on but I am actually rooting for Sun.
The google-sun partnership is a lot more than hype. Google buying up a lot of new SUN servers? Most anything that google touches or partners with turns to gold, this is the start of something huge. You think the dot.com revolution started a big rise of hardware purchases? What happens when Google blankets the earth in free wireless and uses SUN servers to make it happen? Great article with a positive slant on this partnership that few others noted. It's from CNN Money - where slashdotters do not roam? http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/14/technology/techinv estor/tech_biz/
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Can someone help me with the Geronimo reference in the head post? I can interpret it two ways: either Sun is having some problem with selling their systems with Geronimo, or that somehow the existence of Geronimo is bad for Sun, despite being a Java solution that would run on Sun kit as easily as anyone's. Neither interpretation seems to make sense.