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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.
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. :)
I'm pretty sure the DoD singlehandedly props up Sun.
Then you'd be wrong. Sun's biggest customers (and thus their bread and butter) are the Telecom companies. Sun makes no secret of this.
As a developer I find Sun/Solaris a complete paint-in-the-ass to work with.
Really?
Impossible to find binary versions for most packages
I assume you're referring to the Open Source Software that Sun Freeware provides binaries for, and not the commercial software? Because I can't say I see much Solaris software in binary form.
endless back-and-forth dealing with version dependencies
You mean patch levels? Bah, that's easy. Sun tells you which patches you need for a package up front, then provides you with all of them. Try keeping an RPM system up to date sometime. Now THAT is pain and anguish.
and ordering a server that didn't come with a CD drive, DVD drive or video card?
Whoever ordered that server must have explicitly not wanted a drive. AFAIK, all Sun servers have CD or DVD drives by default. Otherwise you'd have a hard time installing all that software that Sun sends with the machine.
Then the admins blindly install Sun updates and we all get to be Sun's gunieapigs learning side-effects.
This differs from MSCEs, how again?
AFAIK, the banks and telecom companies are still buying mad quantities of Solaris on SPARC. Why in their right minds, would sun switch their primary platform, and thus alienate all their loyal customers, who would then be put in the position of having to choose a new platform (which might or might not be provided by Sun).
Plus sun has some pretty revolutionary SPARC stuff coming out in the near future, Niagara and Rock being the two best examples. I have a funny feeling SPARC is here to stay for quite some time.
Plus did I mention that sun has about 40% of the Unix server market, which if I'm not mistaken is about four times the size of the Linux server market?
They are trying to take on Dell in the lower end, thru to the SMP "big iron" machines as well.
1) ROCK solid hardware. I've literally seen a Sun machine (A rather big and heavy SunBlade 2000) be dropped down a flight of stairs, and still boot up and run no problem. I've also seen 10+ year old Sun sparc32 systems still in use today with almost clear maintinance logs all the way back.
... Sun to the rescue..
.... take that for what it's worth .... .. just off the top of my head .. I'm sure I'll think of half a dozen more in the time it takes slashdot to post this comment ...
2) Very good vendor-side support in terms of faulty hardware or spare parts. Can be expensive at times, but you get more than what you pay for.
3) With Sun's hardware/software stack (stuff like ALOM, for example) you can do neat stuff you simply cannot do with any other platform. Might not be the easiest to click your way through installing, but once its up and running nothing can compete.
4) Need to take that hard drive out of your 1 CPU e250 server and shove it into a big 64CPU e10k and have it boot/work? Need to hot swap some CPUs? Need the speed of internal FC-AL hard disks? Cant live without that 24gb of ram?
5) Sun is one of the VERY few vendors to provide a software stack certified for use "in the operation of a nuclear facility"
Considering how long Sun has been working with Linux and how much source code they've released to the Open Source community I'd hardly classify them as "jumping on the bandwagon". There are few companies that give back as much to the community as Sun and yet they continue to do so even with hoards of people like you demanding more.
Would you prefer companies not "jump on the bandwagon" and just ignore Linux all together?
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
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.
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.