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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?"
And to think, just yesterday I was pointed at thier jobs page by a friend...
Moon to cut only 1200 jobs (and Marvin gets to keep his).
Who's your user, program?
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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Yang Yuanqing was rumoured to be grinning, while wispering "..excellent"
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Political discussion for a new world
its still always a dream to work for sun.
Time to buy stock in Sun finally?
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.
Yeah it sucks badly to lose your job, but it doesn't really mean Sun is going down the hole. It means they are cutting the fat. I don't know how profitable of a company they are, but this is typical of companies that are trying to be all things to all people. It generally means they are going to re-focus on their core market (what actually made them money in the first place).
I remember when Amazon refocused. They were selling so many ridiculuos (to ship) items, there were many products you could get at a local store that cost more to ship than the product itself!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I bet it will be office space like situation there now. "Michael Bolton"...you can call me "mike"
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.
Good timing. I start a new Sun class next week on MTP/MBM. I'm sure the guy is going to be lots of fun.
You don't think the remaining 32,000 or so employees are enough to keep the lights on?
What about the future of 5,000 human workers?
Relocate to Redmond, where they are still sought after only to push the housing prices higher in NW OR Relocate to Infosys which is seeking all kinds of Geeks in India & China.
What Sun hasn't mentioned is that contract workers are still needed, in great supply. Even during, and after, the job cuts contract workers will be needed. I'm not just talking about 3mo gigs, 1+ year contract workers will be in high demand. If you're damned good, they may even hire you on. All their doing is cutting the fat, not the muscle.
In this world of executives where they are rewarded for what The Street thinks, and the The Street only cares about this quarter's results, this is a BAU process.
Verizon is cutting staff again, I think this is iteration #2354 for them. Of course the work doesn't go down, it just shifts to the people left.
I took a Unix systems programming class from Sun about five years ago and it was very good. The only downside to the class were the attitudes of some of the Sun employees that were in there. They repeatedly told the rest of the class that they "didn't really need to know this stuff" and that they were "web guys" or "java gui guys" and that the nuts and bolts of Unix were tangential. When they were in the room they spent most of their time talking about the price of Sun's stock. It was hard to imagine how the company was going to go forward when so many employees seemed to think that their core products (Unix servers) were not really worthy of learning about.
I really like Sun's stuff and I hope that they are able to make a big comeback; but they are not going to do it counting on the folks that were in my class.
Here here ... I'll second that! Now that McNealy is no longer running the show, maybe Schwartz will finally do things right. Reality is that Sun put a toe in the Linux waters, got scared, and ran away. Meanwhile, that gave the competition a chance to build up their Linux offerings and eat Sun's lunch. They might not have wanted to compete with their Sparc biz, but the competition sure didn't hesistate to it for them. They need to ditch the chip biz and the Solaris biz, and refocus on their strenghts, putting together rock solid hardware and backing it up with second to none service. I wouldn't say Sun is down and out yet, but if they don't stop fighting the commodity components / Linux trend, they are going to eventually follow in SGI's foot steps.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Point proven, I'd say...
I know people who work for Sun here in CZ. I also went through their interview process while I was looking for a job in January. Sun decided a long time ago that continued investment in the US was a waste of money. They directly told me they had no interest in having new employees in the US. Their operations have been growing in eastern Europe and India. The layoffs come as no surprise to me at all. They have been creating the redundancy to be able to let go of people for a while.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
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.
We tend to forget that companies (from mom-and-pops to corporations) are nothing but a group of humans (investors, owners, board members, employees, etc) all working for a common goal. They need to worry about the future of the other 32,500 human workers and the thousands of human pensioners whose will be affected if Sun goes belly-up. So, yes, "what will this mean for the future of the company?" is a very important human related question.
Remaining Sun employees to be paid in Grid computing hours.
How many of these jobs were for lawyers who write up new "open source" licenses?
http://outcampaign.org/
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...
What? Everyone take note, I think we have isolated Tony Snow's slashdot ID ...
Anybody who still or might some day work for said company cares. People still working want to know what happens since companies are creatures of habit when it comes to lay-off policy. If it's 3 hours notice and zero severence, people will step up the job hunt and take just about any offer to get the hell out. If it's a nice pacakge, they'll take stock in thier own finances and weigh the bail-out-now option against it. Anyone who might want to work for the company will shy away for 18 months or so (long enough to forget and/or tell themselves "yeah, there were layoffs, but that was almost two years ago and...").
Cutting staff is never a good sign and reflects a colossal amount of stupidity on the part of management. In this case, it means "we couldn't figure out how to make money with these 5,000 people". Unless it's 5K worth of mouth-breathing middle-management, it's a sad statement on the company vision & direction from the top and the lack of grasroots channels to communicate from below. Nothing worthwhile coming from the top, nothing able to break through from the bottom....
The real question is, how much of a pay cut are the top execs taking? What's that you say, zero? In fact you say they're getting fat bonuses? Yeah... that's what I thought....
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
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.
Number of 5000 is large enough to forget the each life of the each people. :-(
Jonathan Schwartz's blog says a lot more behind the decision to cut the 5,000 employees. You may or may not agree with the decision, but it's far more informative about the direction Sun is heading in than the /. submission link.
h ase_2
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan?entry=p
Nnot exactly, they're doing what they feel is right to maximise shareholder value which doesn't necessarily have to be the same thing.
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Wholeheartedly agreed here.
Okay, in the low end (4 cpus and under) Linux has made some inroads, but being related to a Sun employee I know for a fact that at the midrange and high end they are destroying HP and Dell in our market, and IBM is holding their own with AIX and Linux. When Linux is as robust as Solaris on Sparc we'll talk, but no matter what the fanbois say it currently isn't. Eighteen year old kids running OpenSolaris on marginally compatible hardware don't count. Enterprise Sun boxes like the E25k have uptimes that put linux servers to shame, unless of course you drop a thermite grenade on the system in which case you'd better be clustered. My own experience with their enterprise hardware/software has been good as long as you have a support contract. If you don't, too bad.
The Sparc still scales much better than the Opteron.. for now. I've heard rumors that there are more heavy-hitter Opteron boxes on the way, and while they will run Linux the push will be for Solaris. Bring em on.
Commercially supported Unices are not evil, open source dogma notwithstanding. I had to lobby my ass off to get Linux into my shop, and even then I had to go with RedHat AS running on Dell with a support contract. Not that this is the fault of the Linux community, but the support from both suck compared to what we had with Sun. Our next hardware refresh is due next year and it is my intent to put Solaris on AMD hardware in play.
I think SGI was just a tad bit more focused on a single area than Sun. If you want to make a comparison I'd put the McNealy fronted Sun in the same category as DEC. Hopefully Schwartz will put out the fire.
What, and make money selling it?
Since when is jumping on the Linux bandwagon the magic money making, company saving pill?
If your point was that Sun could have been a cultural champion of a Linux revolution, then perhaps.
I have to admit, I was a bit stunned myself... but hey, them's the breaks with moderation!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
For the last 5 years, being cut meant that it was going to be difficult to get a job. Right now, there is a shortage of techies in the Denver (where I am guessing that some 1-3K will come from). So as to the ppl, most if not all will be ok.
Of course, according to the gov. numbers, they would be wise to pick up jobs real quick, rather than taking too long.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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-
To clarify, where I work we run a mix of Solaris, Linux, and OS X, with a sprinkling of BSD (ok, and a couple of Windows machines and the old Netware cluster, but that's not my problem). I don't dislike Linux. Most of our new deployments run Linux. That doesn't mean that Solaris sucks, in any way, especially once you've installed the [plug] Blastwave community-provided software, which makes SunFreeware look rather inconsistent and incomplete.
-30-
Meanwhile, competitor Microsoft is making room for 12,000 new employees.
Hmm...
I Guess this explains the new Sun Microsystems building I see getting built in my city....
Sun hardware rocks. Seriously, would you rather run a 32 bit consumer dell box built to the cheapest possible denominator or a 64 bit Sun Solaris box built to withstand industrial abuse? If your just playing around, I am sure a dell is fine if you want to spend most of your time tracking down hardware failures in riser cards. You get what you pay for and cheaper hardware is just that, cheaper.
I was a Dell technician who used to fly out to remote installations to fix the dumbest hardware failures that just don't happen with a Sun box. I don't work for Sun. I work in an IBM shop where we run linux and the stuff is nice. At home, I run Solaris on a 64 bit sparc. I like linux but the difference between Solaris and Linux is night and day. Yes there are some Linux features I wish were in Solaris, but overall Solaris X is faster and more stable and has some awesome features.
Hopefully people will see the value of Sun. You can find the "overpriced" hardware dirt cheap used. Pick some up. You will be amazed. The difference between Sun and Dell mechanically is like the difference between a high end road bike that fits you well and a cheap bike from Walmart: both will get you down the road, but the one that rides better is immediately noticeable.
You can also run Solaris on X86 architecture. Download it for free and fire it up, the performance will amaze you.
Java is probably the best example of great technology held back by completely incompetent marketing.
I had heard about numerous problems with Java in the past (JVM performance, licensing issues, etc.) but had not known its marketing was widely perceived to be one of them. I'm curious ... what was it that the Sun marketing staff did that was so "incompetent?" Did they do something that turned off users or developers in the way it was marketed? Did they run big ads saying 'Java causes intestinal cramps' or hand out Java-logo clubs for killing baby seals?
"95% of all Slashdot
Shareholders = investers...Typically the investers (you know the people who fronted the cash to make the business) should be the most important people to the business. While it sucks people lose their jobs, one could say they would never have gotten taht job if nobody invested in the company. Oh and by keeping the doors open, this ensures that all of the employees of the company keep their jobs while the investers have a chance of getting their investment back (with some reward for taking the risk).
Now what I think should happens it the CEO not take salary for two years, and that all of his upper management take 1/2 pay cut. But that would never happen.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Losses in the private sector serve an important economic function just like profits.
Sun is obviously not using these workers to their full potential. They have many highly qualified engineers and not enough customers. These employees will find work elsewhere. Most of these people anticipated this outcome to one degree or another, and should have prepared.
Losing a job is just part of a career. It's not necessarily bad. Loyalty on either side is only efficient to a certain point before it becomes a burden.
And "maximizing shareholder value" is not bad either. It's important because the board of directors is essentially spending other people's money, so they have a responsibility to pay attention to important economic indicators. Losses and profits might not be perfect measures of economic value, but those are the best measures we have. Any attempt in the past to ignore prices, profits, or losses has been a miserable failure.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Seems to be working for Novell so far...
But Sun has been actively trying to undermine Linux when it should be targeting MS.
Actively undermining Linux? What are you on?
They provide Java for Linux, developer tools for Linux. They produce Star Office (and the open source equivalent Open Office) for Linux. Sun ships Linux.
This is a very strange kind of undermining.... but I guess in some peoples minds the very idea that Linux might not be suitable for everything is 'undermining'.
In SUN's situation I'm not sure of their future.
I agree. My group manages thousands of midrange/high-end servers and we generally use Solaris as our first choice. To me, they seem to be one of the easier to use commercial Unix products, AIX coming in as a close second IMHO. We're still rather timid with regards to Linux (RHAS). Linux is great for some things, but there's still a lack of comfort when your application costs $500k per hour of downtime. The high-availability that we achieve with Sun hardware and Solaris is more baked at this point in time.
Also, let's not forget support- it seems like this is so-often overlooked. My understanding is that even before Solaris went open, the cost of the OS license was trivial when compared to having good backend support. Again, with critical applications hold huge downtime costs, it's rather important to be able to get to tier-3 engineering when problems do inevitably come up.
How does a company increas profit? Not through cutting edge products that the public eats up. Not through going on an agressive selling campaign. No, the way to increase profits is just to get rid of all those pesky employees who eat up your money with their stupid salaries and their sissy healthcare coverage.
In fact, lets just outsource everything to a country where they force people to work 20 hour days for $10 a month. Profits will go up, executives will all get pay raises, then jump ship with their golden parachutes right before the first batch of crappy overseas products hit the market and ruin the company. Billiant!!!
Take the multi-core uSparc family. There are three viable choices for server CPUs today-- Intel/AMD-something, PPC family, or uSparc. Intel and AMD are fighting each other for margins. The fabless uSparc design is tight and well designed. IBM can't let go of the PPC family for many reasons, but it lags behind the Intel/AMD world vastly.
Java? Nice technology with a crummy marketing plan. The Java Desktop is pretty cool stuff.... and needs lots of sandpaper and varnish to make it work well. Do they have an intelligent developer program? No. Certification/education program? No. They should look to Oracle or even Cisco to learn how to do this right. Sun Press. Think about it.
There are other programs which need to be whacked with a sharp knife. R&D is a very good thing, when you have focus and vision-- and not a chip on your shoulder about how Bill and Steve done-ya-wrong. It's all about understanding your clientele, and avoiding the temptation to involve research in incestuous projects that foster the not-invented-here mentality. Sun needs friends. Sun has enemies. Easy play.
And not one that a hockey player might make.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
There's been a steady stream of layoff announcements over the past 6 years. And yet, Bush and many economist pundits claim the US economy is strong.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
There's also a rumor that Intel is going to layoff people as well, to the tune of 16,000 workers.
This is just yet more of the same from Sun. The business strategy since the bubble bursts seems to be:
Fire 9-11% of the staff to "cut costs"
Take an accounting hit to reduce tax
Acquire many smaller companies adding thousands more staffers
Continue everything else the same
Increase revenue hopefully
Not quite make a profit
Repeat.
pSo, what other secret laws of tax, accounting and business does this exploit, and why is it a good strategy?
Stick Men
Sun is a great company. I respect them a lot. They were UNIX when UNIX wasn't cool. Java, Solaris, SPARC: the list of Sun's acheivements are long and storied.
Just a few years ago, a Sun workstation of your very own was quite the status symbol in geek-dom.
Sun has a lot going for them. I sincerely hope they can turn it around.
For those who get laid off, I hope they land on their feet.
I may be Obnoxious but I'm not Obnoxious enough to revel in the pain of others.
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?
Most shareholders are just people who bought a share. It doesn't have a direct impact on the company as such. And most of them are quite volatile, they'll sell and go buy something else in a wink, it's not as if they care what name their shares bear. Which is why what's good for the shareholders isn't necessarily good for the company. Killing a potentially profitable although not growing quickly enough company could very well be the right thing to do to maximize shareholder value. Even though it's braindead from a purely manageurial standpoint.
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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.
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.
Likewise, Staroffice started on Linux, sun bought it, and now is using this to try and break MS's monopoly.
As to shipping linux, hmmmm. Yeeeaaaahhhhhh. In the same way that MS does apps on Linux. Only when it is a last resort.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The OP was just pointing out that people seemed to care more about the company than the workers, as if the damn company could feel pain. No one's asking you to do anything more than excercise your obviously underutilized empathy a little and throw an "aw, that sucks dude" towards the workers while you're crying over the poor little corporation.
Such is life? Such is life now, not in my grandfather's day when CEOs actually felt a little loyalty to the workers who had made them rich. Some of us don't like the attitude that CEOs can walk away from failing companies with multi million dollar bonuses while the average Joe get's shafted out of a job and a pension.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
best of luck to those affected.
MORTAR COMBAT!
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.
actually Sun did have its own Linux distribution. It's was called Java Desktop and I think it was based on Suse.
And yes they used their "vaunted engineering skills" to help Linux. Sun is a very big supporter of Gnome Desktop
They're doing what they feel is right to put the company back on track.
You mean like feel what they are doing will keep the company alive for another decade, or feel what they are doing will make for a nice CEO stock option bonus?
What one feels is always subjective to perspective.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Let me explain why I don't care.
These people are highly educated professionals. They already live in Silicon Valley. Most will have new jobs within weeks, perhaps with a minor pay cut. A few may have to relocate. Nobody will be living on the street.
I know this sounds like a disaster for people in many parts of the world, but pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley has been laid off a few times. It's just how things are here, and for most people it doesn't mean much more than a bit of a vacation.
And there are many many Americans with jobs who are in a much tougher situation than these people.
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.
Eh, this is an old myth spread around here that has no basis in reality. Sun was not funding SCO to sue the Linux world. Sun paid SCO so that they were in the clear with regard to the Unix code that was at the heart of Solaris. Sun was not paying SCO to sue IBM over Linux. But feel free to believe what you will.
Likewise, Staroffice started on Linux, sun bought it, and now is using this to try and break MS's monopoly.
I seem to recall StarOffice as always being a platform-neutral aplpication. The wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staroffice) seems to confirm that. And regardless, they took StarOffice and released it to the open source community as OpenOffice.org. I use it on all my Solaris, Windows and Linux boxes. What's the problem?
As to shipping linux, hmmmm. Yeeeaaaahhhhhh. In the same way that MS does apps on Linux. Only when it is a last resort.
Huh? Have you really been paying attention to what Sun is actually doing these days? Sure, Sun has a preference for Solaris, but this is nothing like the lock-in Windows stack that MS promotes. Sun will even sell you Linux support for their X64 servers. Take a look.
I see. So, let me see if I understand this. MS pays SCO for IP and stock. In addition, MS comes out in support of SCO's bogus lawsuit. They are accused of supporting SCO.
At the exact same time, SUN pays SCO for IP and stock. But this time, SUN already owns the IP (whereas MS at least could honestly say that they did not). Sun even comes out and says that SCO may have something to their lawsuit (neither saying that they support or reject it). Sun later sells the stock.
And you think that Sun is not part of SCO's plan? Hmmmmmmm. faith-based thinking gets you no where.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
My thoughts exactly. I switched my small consulting company to Linux servers and let go our part time (40K/year) IT guy and hire cheap college kids to do the work. They like the experience and I get things cheap. I had to pay the Microsoft IT guy a lot of money just because of the market rates around this area.
Yah the first thing I thought when I read the headline was these are all the JAVA employees going given the rumors of open sourcing JAVA.
I love Linux but I do see it as a race to the bottom in terms of cheap software (free too) and low cost labor. It is a great package for companies (even small ones like mine) and especially big corporations and governments because it boosts profits.
Sun has been laying off workers since early 2000. They even have entire abandoned buildings:s ystems.htm
http://www.abandonedbutnotforgotten.com/sun_micro
Sun expanded by leaps and bounds during the DotCom boom, and has been contracting ever since the DomCom bust. This shouldn't surprise anyone. Sun will be around for a long time to come, just not as large as during their "glory days" of the 1998 Foosball/Aeron/Nerf DotCom era that we all miss.
On Linux I can get to 100% full / with 0 blocks available and the system stays up. On Solaris the system grinds to a halt and becomes unresponsive.
I love Solaris, but I find it incredible in this day and age that I can bring a Solaris box down (accidentally!) and that the OS doesn't have some protection from stupid mistakes. Why can't Solaris protect me from myself?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.
The same with Linux (well, the biggest box I have used was a 16-way NUMA SGI Altix, but there are 512-way Altixes out there).
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.
This is a property of hardware, not OS (and of the fact that Solaris runs on a very limited kinds of hardware). Yes, it is definitely better when Solaris can say "the bad RAM is in a bank 3", and you can open the box and see the bank labeled "3", while for example HP DL-585 uses different CPU ordering than Linux (1, 0, 2, 3 instead if 0, 1, 2 3). But this is a property of HW, not OS.
There may be things where Solaris is better than Linux, but there is also a lot of features, where Linux outperforms Solaris. For example, Linux had a NUMA memory allocator long before Solaris, and it can use Read-Copy-Update, while Solaris can't (software patent by IBM granted to GPL'd projects only). Linux can have multiple copies of the kernel text to speed up the NUMA machines. SGI (rest in peace) did a good work on the scalability of the Linux kernel. On the workstation level, the hotplug/udev/hal/d-bus integrated with GNOME comes to mind.
-Yenya
--
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
Many years ago, when McNealy was asked why he was against having NT on SPARC, he replied that he did not want his company to become a low-margin supplier of boxes.
What you are offering is to become yet another (failed) Dell's competitor in a niche market (Linux market is much less that Windows one). You're offering them to become a manufacturing and marketing (+ some services) company instead of a technological one.
I don't think it is a right way.
Sun has a lot of issiues because of being a niche company in a market turning into the commodity one. First it happened to the workstations, now it happened to servers.
However, your proposal is still not a viable strategy for a 12bln company.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
> But Sun has been actively trying to undermine Linux when it should be targeting MS. McNealy's attitude towards linux has been akin to Bush action about alternative energy. Quite honestly, McNealy has been Sun's worse enemy.
Come on, Sun was targeting MS as nobody else in the industry.
BTW, theit attitude towards Linux was kind of similar (on the bigger scale) to their attitude towards Windows because both Linux nad Windows symbolized the same thing: commoditisation (sp?) of their market with squeezing out independent players with their unique and, thus, more expensive technology.
It is kind of like in the media when most newspapers can no longer affeord to have their own reporters over the world and rely on the 3 or 4 news gathering conglomerates who now define to large extent what is written in the papers.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Now, how about somebody modding GP up? Parent just proved he wasn't flamebaiting.
I wouldn't piss on a person if they were rolling around on the ground on fire, and I'd not bother getting out of my car to help them if they were bleeding out in a ditch after a car accident. Seriously. Nice strawman. In your two examples, I could help the person put his/her fire out or drive the injured person to the hospital.
What am I supposed to about 5000 employees jobs?
Greedy lawyers ( http://users.wfu.edu/palmitar/Courses/SecReg-Palmi ter/Handout/Articles/Elkind-Lerach-King-Dead.htm ) and Wall Street vultures (sorry, "respected industry analysts") changed the companies' mentality to the short term one.
It is interesting that McNeely actually was objecting to the latest layoffs.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
It means they are cutting the fat.
Let's see. Last year they RIF'd some people. Then they bought StorageTek which added 7000. Now they're RIF'ing 5000.
Trimming the fat?
Since the dot com bubble burst, Sun has been laying off many thousands of staff per year, but at the same time acquiring other companies. Remember Cobalt? Within a year of the acquisition, the product line had withered on the vine, most of the staff had been RIF'd and the Cobalt founder left to start another company.
Have a look at Sun's history since 2001. Look at RIF's, acquisitions, revenue, profit/loss and "costs" under those funny accounting laws.
I'm not sure Sun wants to make a profit. I suspect they want to keep ticking over, buying and RIF'ing, taking "hits" against costs, whatever.
Why? What are they up to?
Later this year, Sun will probably buy another company, take on a few thousand more staffers, and this time next year, lay off another few thousand.
Stick Men
To answer the other question, yes, *part* of that is hardware. On Sun hardware, Solaris can tell you that it's DIMM 17 that has the failure, and on more expensive Sun hardware, you can hotswap the CPU or memory. Hell, on some of the hardware you can *upgrade* the CPU to a faster model without shutting down the OS, or add memory to a board with 0 downtime.
However, it can shut down a CPU and stop using it, or stop using a bank of memory on any system. I have no knowledge of any Linux distrubution, or *BSD, that can keep a system with a bad CPU or memory from crashing on the spot.
-30-
There are three viable choices for server CPUs today-- Intel/AMD-something, PPC family, or uSparc
IBM can't let go of the PPC family for many reasons, but it lags behind the Intel/AMD world vastly.
IBM's Power architecture is currently the king of the hill for servers (vs Sparc, x86, Itanium, etc.), has been for some time, and it looks like the Power6 will continue this trend.
If by PPC you were referring to the processor previously used in the Mac, then you should not have included it in the list of "server" processor choices. The Power4, Power5, Power5+, Power6 etc. are the server processors from the Power line.
Our benchmarks say something completely different.....
Multi-core Itaniums lead, followed closely by multi-core AMDs, followed by uSparc Ts, then the Power family.
This, using Linux 2.6 kernels in minimal/sparse installs, and LMBench3.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Bank of memory throwing correctable ECC errors? Map it out. Processor that has ECC errors in it's cache? Map it out
Coincidentally, our Sun box died this morning once AGAIN due to the LACK of ECC in cache and memory. While I'm sure the box you speak of is newer, they sure shot themselves in the foot by shipping so many systems without industry standard ECC for the last few years.
*sarcasm* You sir are management material. Developers are just replaceable parts. Any developer is the same as any other developer who gets the same pay ( better if they do the job for less ). *end sarcasm*
Layoffs are not done based soley on skill level and experience. Some good programmers will be cut with the chaff. Good people are going to get hurt. For some it may be an opportunity, for others it will be a tragedy.
New Rule: Don't judge people by their employer. There may even be some good developers at Microsoft and even *gasp* SCO. Although in the latter case, they may have been locked in a machine room for the last decade or so *wink*. Maybe the door was blocked by stacks of legal briefs and subpoenaed documents.
All joking aside. Being layed off can be one of the best and worst things to ever happen to you. Depends on your personality, personal situation, and just plain luck. I was one of the lucky ones... although I helped improve my odds with months of social networking and daily job hunting.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
And, so ... Are the fortunate ones to be considered tendon, grissel, cartilage, nerve endings, bone? I guess a company can never have "too much nerve". I wonder what is the version of
--a "corporate root canal"
-- corporate bone marrow extraction
-- corporate cartilage snipping
-- corporate tendonits
Strike the corporate tendon and cartilage and they will swagger like the zombies in Return of the Living Dead that shouted "LIVE BRAINS", "MORE BRAINS"...
(I never liked cartilage in my food, either, nor the veins in shrimp and chicken, for that matter..)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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?
Mabe the ACs out there don't know that Bugs Bunny wasn't the first to step foot on the moon. Someone else was....
Who's your user, program?
Publish benchmarks like TPC-C and SAP transactions, etc. consistently show Power winning significantly.
...aside from the mindshare of Linux, aside from the simple problem of customers jumping on the Linux bandwagon just because, is that they will never be able to match or even come close to the power of Linux development.
Think about it. They have two major operating system vendors (Red Hat and Novell) that are in direct competition with them. And since Red Hat and Novell both work on Linux, well - guess what! That's two companies behind Linux, versus one behind Sun.
And we haven't even begun to talk about hardware, where IBM, Intel, HP and Dell are gunning at them as well. More companies that work on Linux.
So it's Sun working on Solaris, trying to convince people that it's "open" (well, sort of) and somehow materialize a super open-source developer force many, MANY years too late versus Linux, which runs on twenty plus architectures (including all of Sun's), sports better performance, better mindshare and coders with religious fanaticism plus the backing of MANY heavyweight corporations.
And I haven't even begun to talk about real technical issues (hint: Linux does NUMA, CPU hotplug, massive scalability, etc quite nicely).
This post is probably going to sound like a big troll to some. Its biggest litmus test will be time, and barring any major changes in direction from Solaris or Linux, history and smart predictions say Solaris is on its way out. How soon Sun decides to phase it out is going to be the biggest factor in how badly it hurts them.
As others have noted, SUN maintains the luster of quality hardware (well deserved), and I'm sure it shows in good part due to Solaris' support for them.
One strategy for SUN is to follow the steps of IBM - expand support/build consulting business while maintaining its hardware/research quality. SUN's much smaller than IBM, but both are quite similar in that their greatest assets are quality hardware and engineering reputation. An importnat but subtle advantage is SUN controls Java.
Nnot exactly, they're doing what they feel is right to maximise shareholder value which doesn't necessarily have to be the same thing.
If shareholder value is maximised, then the company IS on track. As far as the owners of the company are concerned, the company exists to make money. Employing people and making products is a means to an end.
By "need people who are really good" I think you mean "want people who have a precise match with their organization in terms of both technical and Line-Of-Business experience".
If you've been in the job market at all in the past five years, you would realize that it isn't about generalized ability or skills anymore. It's about being lucky/resourceful enough to match the keyword lists being generated by HR, or lucky/resourceful enough to be able to cut through the HR maze and deal directly with the technical manager.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
How specific are the requirements (skills and experience) that you're looking for?
Are you inadvertently/unconsciously subtracting folks from consideration early in the resume evaluation process that might be able to do the job effectively?
Is this a long-term position (where some training is viable), or a short-term one where a drop-in employee is vital?
Many employers cause their own "talent shortages" due to overprecision or simple overoptimism when drafting job requirements.
If your stated requirements are unrealistically high, you'll cut down the number of responders overall and probably increase the number of responders who are willing to pad their resumes just to get in the door. Fewer hits, and even fewer genuine candidates.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.