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Sun's Scott McNealy's Days are Numbered?
alek writes "The Wall Street Journal writes 'Dusk could be near for Sun's McNealy' where they conjecture that the founder and and CEO of Sun Microsystems might be leaving soon. They suggest that the return of former CFO Michael Lehman and and a more active Board pressing for improved performance could result in COO Jonathan Schwartz taking over the top job. We've heard stories like this for years but Scott has hung in there for a long time - his response to the WSJ was 'That rumor is about 22 years old and still chuggin.'"
I suggest you actually look at Solaris. There are some amazing capabilities in there way ahead of Linux.
ZFS is a filesystem that can do raid5-like storage or mirrors. Filesystems can share a common storage pool. You can make snapshots instantly, and at any time you want you can roll back to that snapshot (transactions). Everything about it is very cool, check it out.
DTrace is also amazing. You can observe almost anything about a running program with negligable performance impact. It will break the information down for you statistically so you can tell that, for example, 1% of the time a given function call takes 1000 times longer than average.
It's also got containers and zones, and a service manager.
I have been using Linux and FreeBSD for a long time. I am just getting interested in Solaris, and I am very impressed.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
They've been so obsessed with Microsoft that they failed to see that their biggest threat was IBM. Sun could have easily come in and preempted IBM by making the transition to OpenSolaris sooner, heavily supporting Linux in a real way earlier and making a name for itself in open source sooner. Imagine if they'd started 7-8 years ago with supporting PostgreSQL on their systems and actively developing it into something that was a quality part of their software stack (not saying it's a bad DB). How about if they'd done the official port of Java to Linux, instead of making Blackdown do work on it until Linux became too strong to ignore?
Their leaders are arrogant and resistant to change. That's a bad combination when you're in a competitive field where swallowing your pride and accomodating your users is the most important way of making money.