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Sun to Cut 5000 Jobs
codemachine writes "In one of Jonathan Schwartz's first acts as CEO, Sun Microsystems has announced that they are cutting up to 5,000 jobs over the next 6 months. The company plans to sell property it owns in Newark, Calif., and to exit leases at a site in Sunnyvale, Calif. Analysts will be pleased that Sun has finally taken steps to cut costs, but what will this mean for the future of the company?"
5000 disgruntled ex-Sun employees band together to form a new company, Black Hole, billing themselves as the "anti-Sun" development company and creating a programming language called "Borneo." I can see it coming; it's written in my tea leaves.
Let's hope Sun gets smart and gets rid of the excess layers of middle management and their entire marketing staff, along with a few maintenance guys. If they let go too many programmers, the competition may reap a windfall.
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Nobody cares about what happens to the workers who get fired. You're talking to (mostly) Americans here... Unless its thier job being cut, they just dont care... :-(
And honestly, why should we care? What do you expect us to do about it? They're doing what they feel is right to put the company back on track.
Sun's not-invented-here madness has kept them from overcoming the McNeely mindset.... one that pushed SGi recently into Chapter 11. I, for one, believe that both Solaris and uSparc technologies bring a lot to the table.
Their feistyness has been one of their biggest stumbling blocks for years. This gives them a chance to rebuild, cut some of their more insane projects and financial bleeding, and get back into action.
Sun has very goofy, fence-straddling legacy madnesses: Java programs, licensing issues, relationship issues, Microsoft litigation legacies, and all sorts of baggage. The faster they shed the baggage and go with producing assets, the better, IMHO.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You don't think the remaining 32,000 or so employees are enough to keep the lights on?
Point proven, I'd say...
what exactly is Sun's business model? java is free, their hardware is expensive, linux is also free, and thin clients are great but not what the market wants. are they a hardware company like apple, or a software company like microsoft? or are they a services company?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Why should we care? Of course it sucks to lose your job, but what do you expect everyone else to do? Do you want the gov. to step in and support Sun?
IMHO, Sun has been completely mismanged for a long time and these cuts might not even be enough to save them. It's a good thing that they are finally cutting people in order to try to stay open and continue providing jobs to those who are left. The people who get cut will presumable go out and find another job. Such is life...
Exactly. A whole lot more than 5,000 jobs will be lost if the whole company goes bankrupt. It is not always entirely the employees fault, but look around you, how many people in your office are expendable? As in, if they were not around, the work would not get done. I am guessing it is a very small number of people. As someone who is working in a group that used to be a part of a small/medium sized company that was swallowed by a giant one, I have seen the number of non-essential employees balloon. Managers get budgets, and they want to build empires. So they hire people when the money becomes available, not when the right person becomes available. This leads to a pile of pretty good people, not great ones who can lead the system and innovate.
And honestly I have been marginalized down to a non-essential employee these days. I spend about 40% of my time doing work related to audit, documentation, and corporate policy requirements, not doing new development or fixing bugs. If I got laid off tomorrow, a whole lot of knowledge would be lost, but life for the company would go on.
Nnot exactly, they're doing what they feel is right to maximise shareholder value which doesn't necessarily have to be the same thing.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Here's the thing. It's really hard to make Solaris crash. I can throw a system load of 80 at a two-processor box and still get a response (enough of one to fix the problem causing a load of 80). It can run on a 216-processor single-system-image NUMA box efficiently, including some "self-healing" properties. Bank of memory throwing correctable ECC errors? Map it out. Processor that has ECC errors in it's cache? Map it out. Hotswap the board containing the processor or memory without a reboot. Users don't notice. On lower-end hardware, like the new AMD-based boxes, it will just map out and stop using the offending hardware until you have a chance to fix it. Isn't it better to have a machine drop from 8G of memory to 4G of memory until you can schedule downtime rather than just crash?
There's another, even larger factor. The government (one of Sun's biggest customers) likes Solaris. A lot. And they especially like Trusted Solaris, for which there's basically no *certified* comparable Linux distro. There's a lot of stuff painted Army green or Navy gray that has Solaris machines inside.
Did Sun mismanage things? Hell, yes. Was the major problem that they didn't throw out 20 years of engineering work to switch to Linux? Hell, no.
-30-
I work for a company (not Sun) that makes high-priced, highly reliable machines that competes with other companies that make low-priced, less reliable machines. They're beating us in every market. Customers simply value low acquistion cost over low cost of ownership. It's annoying and counterintuitive, but I've seen it happen over and over again. Sun is facing that situation and you can see what has resulted. Like my company, they've gone from a market maker to an also-ran. It's inevitable, or seems so. And it has nothing to do with quality or capability.
We're due for a major RIF, too. Too many employees for the level of business, I'm afraid.
Funding SCO to sue the linux world is undermining it. And that is just one example. I suspect that once everything settles down, we will see more.
That is just rampant FUD. Sun did not fund SCO. They purchased SCO licenses to avoid legal issues. Big deal.
Now, as to your examples, Java for Linux came from the Blackdown group (which sun then took tried to take credit for). Sun has not really done much in way of support of Java off of Solaris and Windows.
Nonsense. Sun provided a lot of help with Java from Blackdown, and they can certainly claim the credit for much of the code. They have contributed substantially to all Java releases since 1.2 on Linux. How exactly is helping with Java on Linux supposed to be anti-Linux?
Likewise, Staroffice started on Linux, sun bought it, and now is using this to try and break MS's monopoly.
And that is supposed to be anti-Linux exactly how?
As to shipping linux, hmmmm. Yeeeaaaahhhhhh. In the same way that MS does apps on Linux. Only when it is a last resort.
Nonsense. They have been shipping Linux and shipping apps for Linux for years.
Food for thought:
-Didn't Sun co-author SysV Release 4?
-Didn't they already have a license covering multiple architectures? (including x86)
And now the real head scratcher... they publish the source code of an entire SysV unix and they don't get sued by SCO?