Sun CEO On Razors And Blades

Kadin2048 writes "In an interview with BusinessWeek online, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy sheds some light on the company's new business model and future direction. In particular, he said that Sun's recent open source moves were part of a new strategy, where 'The software is the razor. The razor blades are the servers.' The move was called a huge risk by BusinessWeek, and it would put Sun at odds with the more traditional Microsoft-esque model with high per-seat or per-server software licensing costs and use commodity PCs and servers, which may not go over well with investors. But after having seen its stock slide and users flee for Linux and Windows, they arguably have little to lose. Perhaps the most interesting development to Slashdot readers is that in an effort to draw new developers to the platform, Sun is offering a deal that seems torn from a cell-phone company playbook: offering a "free" Ultra 20 Opteron workstation if you sign up for a $29.95/mo, 3-year service contract."

Comments

Re:a free WHAT?

[AndrewStephens]

Actually its $30 a month (== $360 per year). Still a good deal.

Component Hardware first then gravy

[phorest]

It would seem you buy the hardware first @ $360.00 then the rest is all gravy (software and such) @ $720.00. Retail, the system is probably about 800.00. Still not a bad deal.

Re:Component Hardware first then gravy

[laffer1]

Sun bills you in 1 year increments PROVIDED your credit card has an experation date > 3 years in the future. Otherwise you get hit for it all at once.

Its $360 for the first year, and any additional hardware or upgrades are billed in the first installment beyond the base system price. This includes billing you for a keyboard if you order one!

Re:Last Ditch Attempt

[hattig]

Err, you don't seem to get the concept of the razor and razorblades model.

Razor == cheap, Blades == expensive.

Or, in Sun-speak:

Software == cheap, Servers == expensive.

Which pretty much correlates with what Sun have been doing recently.

Amusingly, Sun also sell blades, of the server type :p

Wrong several times over...

[Junta]

The cost is $1080 dollars, since it is ~30/month minimum of 3 years.

Second, an Ultra 20 Opteron does not mean 20 Opterons, it means a workstation model 20 with one processor.

So, while reasonable, not nearly incredible.

Sneaky way to get all of the payment up front

[thpdg]

"Payment method for this promotion is credit card only. The credit card used at time of your Sun Store purchase must be valid for 3 years to allow for proper 2 and 3 year payment installments. If credit card used is valid for less then 3 years, card will be billed in full for all 3 years at the time of delivery."

Make sure you check the expiration date on your card before you order!

You're not very good at being a troll.

[WidescreenFreak]

Troll. You're a complete troll, and you're not very good at it, I might add.

You cannot compare new items to grey/aftermarket for many reasons, not the least of which is because of warranty. There is not one liquidator or after-market reseller that will offer anything like a 3 year warranty on parts and software for an item which obviously is not theirs. (I'm quite sure that no aftermarket reseller is owned by Sun.) To put those units under a three-year warranty with Sun, it might have to be recertified, which is not free, depending on your local sales rep's time of the month (that's a joke, folks), and it will definitely cost more to put that system under a maintenance contract for three years. So, yes, you can buy it cheaper, but putting it under maintenance contract is much more expensive than just buying an Ultra 20 outright. You clearly do not work with Sun hardware in a corporate environment on a regular basis or you'd know this.

Since the warranty is the major selling point of the Ultra 20, your attempt to downplay the Ultra 20 has no merit.

Back to troll school with you! Go! Bad troll! BAD!!

Re:Give them credit here for this

[MikeApp]

The $3000 price is for instructor-led training, I don't see Red Hat, IBM, etc. offering that for free.

As for the teach yourself route, their online documentation at docs.sun.com is actually pretty good. You could also subscribe to the ACM for a hundred bucks or so, which gets you free access to a bunch of Sun's online training for Solaris, Java, and many of the software packages they're now giving away (see http://pd.acm.org/full_listing2.cfm ).

Re:Nice, but too expensive

[Doctor Memory]

Actually, I got the middle model (2.2GHz / 1G / 80G / nVidia NVS 280) for ~$1300, it's a nice box. The video card supports dual-head displays, 1G of memory (expandable to 4G) is tolerable, and the SATA drive is nice and quick. And the best part is -- it's quiet. It's probably just me, but my last box had noisy fans and drives. This thing, while not silent, is probably several orders of magnitude quieter (my guess is it's probably about 40dB).

That said, if I had it to do over today, I'd get a 20" iMac. I'd get a slightly slower processor (2.1GHz PPC vs 2.2Ghz Opteron), half the memory, a much bigger drive (250G vs. 80G), a flat panel display and wireless (which I don't really need, but it might be nice). Oh, and I'd be able to sync my iPod with my own box and not have to borrow the wife's laptop... :/

Oh, but the Sun development tools are pretty nice. I was used to a hodgepodge of FOSS stuff (Eclipse / ArgoUML / JBoss / PostgreSQL) that worked pretty well, but not together. Now I can just use the Sun IDE and app server (and PostgreSQL ;), and deployments are quicker and debugging support is a little nicer (although the Eclipse debugger worked great with JBoss).