Red Hat Set To Surpass Sun In Market Capitalization

mytrip writes "In what may come to be seen as a deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems, Red Hat is on the verge of surpassing Sun Microsystems' market capitalization for the first time. Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market. Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun's market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat's."

Comments

So what?

[QuantumRiff]

Honestly, does "market Capitalization" mean more than 700M in sales vs. 13B in sales?

Re:So what?

[rbanffy]

You know... The relevant part is not about how much you sell, but how much of a profit you make from those sales.

13B in sales won't help if you had 14B in expenditures over the same period.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what they are trying to say is that Red Hat's share price is nonzero.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, does "market Capitalization" mean more than 700M in sales vs. 13B in sales?

Well I think if they'd meant "sales", they'd have put "sales", and not "market Capitalisation".

The sum of Linux vendor capitalization

[Facetious]

The makes me curious. If all Linux vendors had an equivalent of publicly traded market capitalization, what would their sum total be? Naturally it would be lower than Microsoft's $153B (as of this morning), but that isn't bad considering Linux can be had for free. (BTW, I remember back when msft's market cap was over $400B).

Thank you Sun

[rlp]

I for one hope that Sun not only survives, but prospers. Sun has greatly contributed over the years to the development community, particularly FOSS developers.

Re:Thank you Sun

[aliquis]

Personally if I got to choose one of either all of Suns knowledge, experience, code and products or Redhats I'd for sure go with Sun.

Obviously the market works differently =P

Re:Thank you Sun

[aliquis]

(differently = who is more likely to make money of their knowledge, experience, code and products :D)

Re:Thank you Sun

[tnk1]

(differently = who the stock market thinks is more likely to make money of their knowledge, experience, code and products :D)

Corrected that for you.

Re:Thank you Sun

[InlawBiker]

Sun has been a great innovator, but when they were the only game in town they charged obscene prices for their products and services. It helped open the door for Linux and Sun has only itself to blame.

When you walked into a data center ten years ago all you saw were Sun servers. Where I work now I'm hard pressed to find a single Sun box anywhere.

Re:Thank you Sun

[aliquis]

Or rather, how the stock market believes the rest of the stock markets sees the stocks potential to raise regardless of the companies ability to generate revenue, their knowledge, experience, code or products :D

Fixed that for us.

Re:Thank you Sun

[the eric conspiracy]

I for one welcome our new Linux Overlords

Re:Thank you Sun

[SavvyPlayer]

Which is basically redundant considering the market's assessment of an organization's value at any given point in time is mankind's most reliable assessment of its future value. Your first post was fine as is.

Re:Thank you Sun

[crowne]

I think the market pricing is more concerned with operating costs and customerbase rather than knowledgebase.

Re:Thank you Sun

[rbanffy]

This only shows how open-source is a better economic model. Red Hat profits from their own work, in addition to the work of many others like IBM, SGI, HP, Oracle and Sun.

Sun, on the other hand, also has to develop hardware (curring edge hardware, BTW). Their operation is far more costly.

Re:Thank you Sun

[ClosedSource]

Of course you didn't mention the key players - the early implementors of Linux. How many billions have they made?

I guess this "better economic model" doesn't apply to the risk-takers, just to the opportunists that feed on them.

Re:Thank you Sun

[rbanffy]

If you refuse to make a profit, you can't blame those who don't when they make one by offering useful services to a large community.

Re:Thank you Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

When I walked into a data center 10 years ago, I saw mostly HP servers. Now I'm seeing a lot more Sun boxes. I guess it depends on your sample population.

Re:Thank you Sun

[FishWithAHammer]

So how exactly do you plan to run that open-source software without hardware manufacturers? (Don't be stupid and say "open hardware", economies of scale and the cost of fabrication make that really fucking dumb.)

Re:Thank you Sun

[spiffmastercow]

Which is basically redundant considering the market's assessment of an organization's value at any given point in time is mankind's most influential determinant of its future value. Your first post was fine as is.

Fixed that for you

Re:Thank you Sun

[ChienAndalu]

If you think the stock market is wrong, you can earn money.

Re:Thank you Sun

[alexborges]

HUH?

Who are the risk takers and who the opportunists?

This bussiness model is about packaging community made software and getting it ready for prime time by adding value add "stuff" (training, QA, support and consulting).

Some communities make money of their stuff, some dont... who is the oportunist?

Re:Thank you Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. Anything that continues to unleash the ungodly language that is Java deserves their rightful place in the 7th circle of Hell... Right next to Microsoft.

Re:Thank you Sun

[ClosedSource]

I'm not blaming anyone. I'm simply saying whatever benefit there may be for that economic model it doesn't really apply to starting a project. Of course, I doubt that all the early implementors of Linux refused to make a profit.

Re:Thank you Sun

[HardCase]

I agree. Anyway, it's been quite a while since market capitalization has been a good comparison of companies, particularly in the tech sector and especially with the current chaotic market. I guess that market cap is good for bragging rights, you know, "Ha, ha, we're bigger than you," otherwise, it's a minor component of many others that we use to compare companies.

Re:Thank you Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun has greatly contributed over the years to the development community, particularly FOSS developers.

Are you sure about that? Isn't Sun's "open source" really only PR?

Look at NetBeans for example. External code is not accepted at all. Open source developers are looked at as drones to make plug ins.

Look at OpenOffice.org. If you aren't a Sun employee, your contribution will be held in limbo because it wasn't invented by the Sun engineers. Why do you think there are so many forks of OOo? IBM engineers got tired of Sun's closed "open source" and created their own fork. Novell engineers got tired of Sun's closed "open source" and created their own fork.

And Java? Do you think they picked the GPL because they love open source? no. They picked the GPL because they knew all their PAYING licensees won't touch GPL infected code and will continue to buy a non-GPL license from Sun.

Re:Thank you Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun has never found its FOSS feet - the company was founded on completely open software, but took it all proprietary (even if they did hand some back later). McNealy's ranting in the earlier days of Linux, funding SCO... etc etc... none of it has been forgotten. Even today, with OpenSolaris, they still haven't managed to get the same momentum as Linux, because they keep the development closed. Look at Linux kernel development - riotous, noisy, structured only to the degree necessary to get the job done... and yet the kernel development rips along adapting to the changing tech environment in a way that no other kernel has while still providing user land stability and security.

I don't have any ill will to Sun, but they are struggling to adapt in a world that the Linux industry turned upside down by breaking all the established rules of commercial software development (thanks, in large part, to the FSF). Microsoft has survived so far because they have their own monopoly world (but poss not for long).

Re:Thank you Sun

[setagllib]

Red Hat funds a lot of open source development, including a number of their own initiatives. So their existence depended on a lot of open source, but they're helping keep the ecosystem alive now that they do exist.

Re:Thank you Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

But not necessarily in the stock market. Just because it's wrong today, doesn't mean it'll be right tomorrow (or even some time down the road) to let you capitalize on being right today.

Re:Thank you Sun

[linhares]

Some companies really have an edge of innovation. I would not discard Sun, as the market is doing. I see it more or less like Palm: last month, the market hated it; now the market is all-singing; all-dancing about Palm. This is a good time to invest in Sun, methinks.

Re:Thank you Sun

[sqldr]

It's not just price that puts people off sun, it's difficulty of use. There's all sorts of silly pointless things like why you have to put a 01 in front of mac addresses when configuring their ldap client to jumpstart stuff (apparently the 01 means "ipv4" or something, but after learning what it was, i figured it was too irrelevant to bother remembering what it was for), or how when you configure ldapclient it defaults to trying to do name lookups over ldap to look up the name of the ldap server (come on guys, that's a schoolboy error of a bug).

We got 2 x4150s in. Sun hardware, sun operating system.. what could go wrong? 2 weeks later, I still haven't got the bloody Sun operating system installed on Sun hardware over jumpstart, and the vendor providing tech support hasn't got it running either. Why? Turns out it's because the baud rate of the iLom runs at 115khz, and the install image defaults to 9600, and the only way to fix that is to MODIFY THE IMAGE (!!!!). Lost days over that one.

Sun should stop wasting time making pointless crap like "webstack" which is basically apache and mysql, and concentrate on what's missing from their OS - get pkg running, stop making commands difficult to use, and fix jumpstart.

Re:Thank you Sun

[NoOneInParticular]

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

- John Maynard Keynes

Re:Thank you Sun

[ClosedSource]

As you imply, there wouldn't be a Red Hat were it not for Linux. That's not to say the Red Hat doesn't contribute.

My point is just that Linux is not a great example of a business model for creating something new.

Re:Thank you Sun

[ClosedSource]

"Who are the risk takers and who the opportunists?"

Isn't it obvious?

"This bussiness model is about packaging community made software and getting it ready for prime time by adding value add "stuff" (training, QA, support and consulting)."

I think adding real value would be improving the product in such a way that it minimizes the need for training, support, and consulting.

It's like the American vs Japanese view of quality. Do you want to have a long warranty to fix your car when it breaks or do you want a car that doesn't break?

Re:frist psot

[Hognoxious]

A thousand and one posts saying that it's illegal/immoral/impossible to make money from open source software will be along soon.

They'll be followed shortly after by sevaral thousand more complaining that all corporations are evil and should be banned.

In turn those will be followed by several million arguing that google are/aren't evil, or disputing the subtle nuances between doing evil and being evil.

In other words: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. The tuna salad is off, by the way.

A relatively unimportant event

[fishwallop]

I fail to see why this is a "deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems" and not merely a moderately interesting moment in the corporate history of the respective companies (or, more specifically, in Red Hat's corporate history). Red Hat may represent Linux, but it's not Linux, and market capitalization, being a function of share price, is a less interesting metric then any measurement of the actual use of the operating systems these companies produce. Anyone who remembers the Red Hat IPO will know that share price is more closely tied to hype than to particularly signficant tecnical advances.

Re:A relatively unimportant event

[period3]

I fail to see why this is a "deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems" and not merely a moderately interesting moment in the corporate history of the respective companies (or, more specifically, in Red Hat's corporate history). Red Hat may represent Linux, but it's not Linux, and market capitalization, being a function of share price, is a less interesting metric then any measurement of the actual use of the operating systems these companies produce. Anyone who remembers the Red Hat IPO will know that share price is more closely tied to hype than to particularly signficant tecnical advances.

I fail to see why people insist on saying "fail to see" instead of "don't see". It doesn't make you sound intelligent, it makes you sound pompous.

Re:A relatively unimportant event

[dollargonzo]

You are correct about it not necessarily being about technical advances, but who cares? Why are technical advances so important? Did Ubuntu have some great technical advances that caused it to gain in popularity? Perhaps... but I don't think that's why most people like it, or at the very last, many of the people who use it probably can't point to any technical advance as a reason for why they use it. Market cap is a measure of the company's perceived worth, and in that sense, surpassing Sun is significant in that it suggests that Sun's business model is not in line with its revenue stream.

Re:A relatively unimportant event

[fishwallop]

It makes me sound pompous because I am! :)

Re:A relatively unimportant event

[fm6]

I fail to see why this is a "deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems" and not merely a moderately interesting moment in the corporate history of the respective companies (or, more specifically, in Red Hat's corporate history).

It's symbolic because Sun was one of the leaders of the big change that occurred at the beginning of the microcomputer era, when Unix started to replace the old mainframe OSs. And it's symbolic because Sun is the last major player to consider Unix part of its core strategy. Other Unix vendors have become insignificant (SGI, SCO), disappeared, or changed their emphasis to Linux and Windows (IBM, HP).

Also, if you want to run a supported, commercial Unix on commodity hardware, Solaris is really your only option. Which is why both HP and Dell offer Solaris preinstalled. Though I don't suppose they sell a lot of those systems.

As a benchmark of the rise of Linux and the fall of Unix, yeah, it's not that big a deal. But symbols and benchmarks are different things.

This may all be a big yawn to somebody whose career started after Linux began to take over. But to those of us who spent most of our professional lives working with Unix (I started in the early 70s, before Unix was even available commercially; I've worked for 5 different Unix vendors, including Sun) it's as big a symbol as the takeoff of a certain helicopter on Tuesday.

Re:A relatively unimportant event

[alexborges]

Mr Period3, sir, I fail to see your point.

Wrong.

[AltGrendel]

Definition - Market capitalization:
an estimation of the value of a business that is obtained by multiplying the number of shares outstanding by the current price of a share

Re:Wrong.

[QuantumRiff]

I understand that. I was asking if looking at the market capitalization really said more about how the company was doing than its sales numbers? Do we now judge the success of tech companies by looking at what non-technical financial people think the company might be worth in the very short term?

Really, I think it says more of the "investors" that they think a company with sales of 700M a year should be worth (in market capitalization terms) the same or more than a company with sales of 13Billion a year.

Re:Wrong.

[Facetious]

I believe what you are missing here is the cost side of things. Sun is a software AND a hardware vendor. Margins are much thinner on hardware, meaning that Sun's $13B - [large cost] produces profits on par with Red Hat's $700M - [small cost] equation.

Re:Wrong.

[bigtangringo]

They're both public...

Sun

Red Hat

Re:Wrong.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

That is largely right, except for one detail: Red Hat is producing profits, but Sun recently posted a big loss, mostly due to a 1.45B impairment of goodwill charge. (In English: they revised their estimate of the value of some of the companies they've purchased, down 1.45B).

To answer the original thread poster's question: it's not how much you sell, it's how much your keep.

Re:Wrong.

[thtrgremlin]

[does] market capitalization really [say] more about how the company was doing than its sales numbers? Do we now judge the success of tech companies by looking at what non-technical financial people think the company might be worth?

I think customers are a good way to predict what customers will do in the future, but sales volume is only a very small fraction of that equation. The people that really track customer behavior are investment analysts / non-technical financial people. And as far as stock traders being susceptible to hype, it isn't necessarily bad at all to "go with the flow", just be sure to jump ship in time if the only thing you are going on is hype.

But in reality, for as much as traders may be unpredictable and susceptible to hype, you got to admit that customers are MUCH worse.

Re:Wrong.

[ceoyoyo]

It's almost as silly as judging a company by it's gross sales.

What you're looking for is PROFIT. Sun's profit was 88 million, or 11 cents per share in the last quarter (down 73%) while Red Hat's profit was 24 million, or 12 cents per share, up about 7%. Sun is forecasting that they will lose money over the next year, while Red Hat is forecasting (and analysts agree) that they will continue making money.

Sun still made more money than Red Hat, but even Sun agrees that's going to change.

Re:Wrong.

[jadavis]

I was asking if looking at the market capitalization really said more about how the company was doing than its sales numbers?

It's easy to get high revenue -- just sell stuff at or below cost. You won't make a profit, but you'll have a lot of sales.

Do we now judge the success of tech companies by looking at what non-technical financial people think the company might be worth in the very short term?

There are many ways of evaluating a business as a whole, some are subjective, e.g. something "only a technical person can understand why this is good", and some are objective, e.g. something that any financial expert can understand.

You may like to think that you have a lot of insight about the value of a company because you know something about the technologies they use or produce. And that's true, to some degree.

But your ignoring the numbers outright. And the numbers mean a lot. If Sun continues to lose money, and never turns a profit, then its value is precisely the liquidation value of its assets. I'm not saying that's what will happen, but profit is clearly important to the value of a business.

And you're also ignoring all the subjective aspects that you have no ability to evaluate. How well are they targeting their value proposition in the latest advertising campaign? How competent are the executives? Are they using the right pricing model?

I don't buy for one second the idea that non-technical people are clueless about the technology business.

And I also don't buy for one second this "very short term" mentality. Investors choose investments that have some intrinsic value that they believe will hold in the long term. If they don't, they know they might be caught holding the bag, and lose everything.

There are exceptions, "irrational exuberance", etc. But most money is tied up in things with intrinsic value. Those investments may go up or down, but they generally won't go to zero.

Re:Wrong.

[s4m7]

Sun is still a power-player, there's no doubt about that, but looking the the business models of the two companies really makes me think.

Sun has largely focused their revenue streams around two things that seem counterintuitive to me: Profiting from licensing of a (albeit very successful) programming language, and selling deployments that include software that they've developed or purchased, open-sourced, and then re-proprietized on their own hardware. In other words, SUN sells products, and makes some money selling support contracts for these products.

Red Hat, on the other hand, primarily sells a service. Their products, including an extended open-source operating system that they didn't spend that much on development for (relatively), are really just vehicles to get support contracts.

Now I agree that this market-cap milestone is an investor's assessment, but bear in mind that investors in tech companies generally know what the companies they're investing in are up to. That said, I think it's obvious to most people that the service market has much more potential as a growth market than the products market does, especially in light of current economic conditions.

Re:Wrong.

[jocknerd]

It's easy to get high revenue -- just sell stuff at or below cost. You won't make a profit, but you'll have a lot of sales.

Dude, did you used to work for Dell?

Re:Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Market capitalization doesn't mean shit. Nobody will admit this. What matters is the following:
- making a profit
- number of people's income you sustain (# of employees)

Anyone who thinks trading company stock on an open stock market is a good idea is fucking retard. That is only suited for setting the price of bars of gold and truckloads of corn.

Re:Wrong.

[Forge]

According to Yahoo Finance (and I may be misreading stuff, being a novice investor and amateur trader), Sun lost money last year.

So Which business would you rather own: One that makes $24 or one that looses $1400?

Since both are expected to continue in the same direction (RHT posting greater profits while JAVA posts greater losses) The Market caps continue to trend in opposite directions.

At some point Sun will reverse that trend or it's parts will end up being worth more than the whole.

Re:Wrong.

[tinkerghost]

And I also don't buy for one second this "very short term" mentality. Investors choose investments that have some intrinsic value that they believe will hold in the long term. If they don't, they know they might be caught holding the bag, and lose everything.

I am going to point you to the current financial meltdown of some of the biggest banks & trading houses in the US(World) as proof that a large number of "Investors" are choosing investments that have intrinsic value. Most of these "commoditiezed mortgages" were junk, that's why they were being sold. However "investors" saw a chance at a quick buck & bought them up like a 3 year old buying penny candy.

I use "investor" loosely here as they aren't investors, they are speculators. The majority of the money being moved around on any given day isn't about long term investment. It's about short term speculation - hoping to grab a 1-3% growth in 14 days or less, followed by bailing & reinvesting hoping for an annual return of 20% or more.

Investors buy for the long haul. IBM stock isn't a huge mover & isn't likely to make you rich. But it usually shows steady growth and has a dividend.

The majority of the money in the stock market may in fact be invested in long term stocks and bonds, but what people see on the news at the end of the day is how the day traders and speculators are moving. And they are always moving to maximize todays profit - even if that means destroying the long term sustainability of a company to do it.

Shareholders have ousted several boards for favoring long term profit over the quarterly report, so it's not surprising that boards & CEO's are pushing more for the quick buck & less for the sustainability for that profit.

Re:Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you understand that sales isn't the same as profit?

Re:Wrong.

[canUbeleiveIT]

And they are always moving to maximize todays profit - even if that means destroying the long term sustainability of a company to do it.

Shareholders have ousted several boards for favoring long term profit over the quarterly report, so it's not surprising that boards & CEO's are pushing more for the quick buck & less for the sustainability for that profit.

This is one of the problems that I see with publicly-traded companies in a free market. John Deere is a perfect example of this.

Deere used to be a brand with a legendary reputation for quality, which allowed them to charge a premium price for their small farm tractors and lawn mowing equipment. However, the quest for "alternate profit streams" led JD to slap their venerated green and yellow logo on every rebranded piece-of-shit weed whacker, can opener and work boot that came around the bend. They compromised the quality of their lawn tractors by putting the lower-quality Sabre line under the Deere nameplate.

This did generate some good short-term profits for a few years, but the problem with cashing in your reputation is that you can only milk that cow once. Is it any surprise that--in terms of perceived quality and resale value--Kubota small farm tractors have surpassed Deere & Co's offerings?

Re:Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stock markets 101

Why do stocks have value?

Because investors expect a piece of the profits, somewhere along the line. I.e. dividends.

So investors value stocks according to how much dividend revenue, now and in the future, they expect the stock to represent.

A lot of things get baked into this, expectations of growth to come, expectations of profit margin, managements willingness to actually distribute some of profits via dividends, and so and so on.

Gross revenue is only one part of performance, a lot of other thing get taken into consideration.

Re:Wrong.

[Chris Burke]

Is there anyone who thinks that market cap is a good metric to judge a company's overall success by at this particular moment in time? Pretty much every stock has been hit and hit hard, and the degree to which the size of that hit has anything to do with the company itself is highly questionable. The relationship between stock price and a company's success is ephemeral in the best of times, but now?

Re:Wrong.

[Znork]

Investors choose investments that have some intrinsic value that they believe will hold in the long term.

As long as the currency, the fundamental measurement of value, is intrinsically unsound and the rules of the game are changed at whim there basically is no way to determine what investments have a long term profitability. Central banks inherently mismanage interest rates to generate demand that isn't real, leading to an eventual collapse of the kind we're currently seeing.

they generally won't go to zero.

Any leveraged company, ie, any company with loans can go to zero in a very short time and with a very small change in asset values. Most banks today are far, far below zero and unlikely to recover in the next decade at least.

they might be caught holding the bag, and lose everything.

The long term investor is the one most likely getting caught holding the bag. as many tend to hang on all the way to the bottom and the bitter end. Short term traders never lose 'everything' as they define the parameters for a trade and set stop-loss when they buy. Without that discipline you get caught up emotionally, thinking the long term will recover your losses, thinking as long as you don't sell you haven't lost, etc.

In the end, the game is rigged and you're not pulling the strings. Unless you've got the clout to get your ass covered on the taxpayers dime the only way you're going to win is if you can and will act in the very short term.

Re:Wrong.

[BitZtream]

I think your confusing not making their forecasted amounts with losses

Re:Wrong.

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I think you're right about their confusion. RH's net income last year was $403,000,000. This is down from their net income of the year before: $473,000,000. What I think is confusing people, perhaps, is their cash flow statement, which shows a negative value of $1,3B. Where did all that cash go if they have net income? Treasury Stock. A negative $2,6B went to stock repurchase.

If a corporation reacquires some of its stock and does not retire those shares, the shares are called treasury stock. Treasury stock reflects the difference between the number of shares issued and the number of shares outstanding. When a corporation holds treasury stock, a debit balance exists in the general ledger account Treasury Stock (a contra stockholders' equity account).

If the corporation were to sell some of its treasury stock, the cash received is debited to Cash, the cost of the shares sold is credited to the stockholders' equity account Treasury Stock, and the difference goes to another stockholders' equity account. Note that the difference does not go to an income statement account, as there can be no income statement recognition of gains or losses on treasury stock transactions. (This, of course, is reasonable since the corporation operates with total "insider" information.)

The trend looks better, then: Net Tangible Assets (in 1,000s): $1,808,000 $4,032,000 $2,805,000
if we took into account the buyback (as though they had bought IBM instead of themselves)
$1,808,000+2.6B=4.4B $4,032,000 $2,805,000, which is UP not down from the previous year.

Treasury stock causes the Balance sheet and Cash Flow to look negative, since the stock purchased come out of cash flow (as Sale Purchase of Stock (2,587,000)) and also shows up as a negative on the Balance sheet. Since the Income Statement doesn't show Treasury Stock, it looks good.

Re:Wrong.

[donaldm]

Red Hat, on the other hand, primarily sells a service. Their products, including an extended open-source operating system that they didn't spend that much on development for (relatively), are really just vehicles to get support contracts.

Yes Redhat sells a service however you need to qualify what that service involves. If you purchase a service from Redhat you get normally pick from three types, 1) Web Based 2 day response (the cheapest), 2) 12x5 telephone support and 3) 24x7 telephone support. See the following prices .

What this means is Redhat must provide professionally trained service personnel who provide support over the phone by diagnosing and solving quite complex problems on all supported versions of the Rehat OS's. This type of service does not come cheap particularly when you consider that Redhat is a world wide organisation and they have to deal with customers from all over the world some who don't even speak English.

I don't know if you have ever attended any of the Redhat courses, if you have you will know they are not easy so you can't get anyone off the street to provide Redhat support.

Further evidence...

[AKAImBatman]

...that marketing trumps technology. Sun has some incredible tech and even delivers x86 servers at highly competitive prices. Yet because Sun's marketing sucks worse than a black hole, generating new customers is a huge issue for them. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of their business is still through customer reps with little attention paid to the market as a whole.

I personally think that Sun could be successful in quite a few areas of the market. Not the least of which is as a serious competitor to Dell's server business. But first, Sun has to figure out how to communicate with the average customer. Giving their software complex prefixes like "Sun Java System", branding everything with "SPARC" even when it isn't SPARC, changing their market ticker to JAVA, and giving up on new markets before they've made inroads aren't exactly painting Sun in a positive light.

Dear Mr. Schwartz: Please hire a real marketing department and see to it that your product line makes sense to the average consumer. KTHXBYE.

Re:Further evidence...

[eln]

I agree, but it's not only marketing. Sun has apparently decided to go into the support and commodity hardware market. In commodity hardware, margins are razor thin, so they really have to distinguish themselves. In my recent experiences with Sun x86 systems, quality has been something of a problem. They say it was a temporary issue with one of their plants in Mexico, but when we ordered a ton of x86 boxes about a year ago, it took much longer than it should have to get to us, and the failure rate was unusually high.

Also, when they released the x4100 Mk2, they claimed it was virtually identical to the Mk1, and there would be no issues. However, it turns out they made some fairly significant changes such as changing the vendor of the on-board network cards to one that the OS image we were using at the time had no support for. It also had a different type of PCI port (PCIe versus PCIx, IIRC), which meant all of the extra NICs we had lying around were suddenly useless. Had they told us of these changes, it would have been no problem. Instead, they just told us our order was being changed to the "virtually identical" Mk2, and we had to scramble when we got them. Not great customer support there. After that incident, we actually stopped using Sun for x86 hardware entirely.

Going back to marketing though, they are really pushing this "Open Systems" thing, which is nice and all, but their salespeople don;t know how to sell it. At a recent presentation, the Sun sales guy was talking up Open Systems, and a member of the audience asked, "If everything is open and interchangeable, why shouldn't I just use your free open source software and go buy a cheaper system from Dell? What is the advantage of your box, if it's commodity like the rest? Why should I buy from you?", and the sales guy had no answer for him! He actually stumbled over his words for about 30 seconds, at one point actually saying there was "no reason" before one of his colleagues finally pipes up with something about "end to end support".

Maybe they need to be touting the end to end support first, and the open systems stuff second. Suits tend to like open source because it's a lot cheaper, not because they're big on the philosophy, so stop pushing the "open source" thing so hard when the open source bit is the part you're giving away for free. Market the entire platform as an end-to-end solution, and throw in the open source part as an aside. Sun's marketing team doesn't seem to get that.

Anyway, that was a bit long-winded, but the point is that Open Source isn't going to save Sun by itself. They have more problems, and I see them surviving as a much smaller and less interesting company than they are today if they stick to the path they're currently on.

Re:Further evidence...

[Samschnooks]

That's what happens when you manage from an engineering mind set. When SUN started, they were leaders in technology: no one was doing what they were doing and there was a need for that technology that they developed. The market only rewards better engineering when it satisfies their needs. Now, computing power is a commodity and generic software is a commodity.

The market that is left in SAP type of stuff. Software that allows a company to become more competitive. There's more new markets, but I'm too old to know where it is - and I'm ten years younger than the senior management of SUN. The next software big thing is going to come from an 18 year old in his parent's basement and I don't think it's going to be PC based. It's going to be some device (I don't know, a toaster that takes a whole loaf of bread, slices it, toasts the bread, and cooks the bacon) and it'll become "necessary".

Either SUN gets some young blood or they will turn into - I don't want to say it. They have MANY patents and they invented MANY of the things that run the internet (thanks Joy!) and I'm sure there are folks violating those patents. Just saying....

Re:Further evidence...

[asv108]

Its not just marketing, it being able to purchase products online at the actual price. You can't just login to sun.com and buy servers via a online portal with a corporate discount like Dell or HP. You have to talk with a rep to get the actual real price, not the phony MSRP price.

Re:Further evidence...

[thtrgremlin]

IBM was another player that tried to take advantage of their strong market dominance to control things. It didn't work out for them in the long run, and they had to adapt to an F/OSS world. This happened to sun just a bit later. Is the unmentionable company another software giant with strong market control that you predict has forgotten how they got to where they are today such that soon you will see them going on to the back burner? Big nameless company is nearing about the same amount of time IBM and Sun had before their ship set sail into the past as a market leader, and they are following many of the same trends each followed.

Oracle, right? (j/k)

Re:Further evidence...

[C_Kode]

With the current way Sun does business hardware wise it cannot compete with Dell directly. Sun sells higher end hardware and Dell sells lower end servers very cheap. You can buy two Dell servers loaded with the same memory and SCSI drives instead of SATA drives, with 3 years support for what a single Sun server would cost you. I have several JBoss clusters and I just throw Dell PE1950s at them. If one crators, the rest of the cluster just hums along. Sun competes with HP, IBM, and the like. They DO NOT compete with Dell. Although, Dell can definitely compete (and steal market share) from Sun. Especially now with the current state of economy and everyone being so cost conscious.

Re:Further evidence...

[AKAImBatman]

For quite some time, Sun was undercutting Dell on AMD64 servers. I have been told that you can still get the servers cheaper if you have a rep. The problem is that Sun gave up on the rest of the market after only a short push. (You might remember the "rhymes with hell" ads here on Slashdot.) And dealing with a central sales rep is a pain and a half when any segment of a large company can order a server through Dell.com.

So I'm not surprised that you think Sun doesn't compete with Dell. As I said, they have a massive failure in their marketing department and no real commitment to expanding their business.

Re:Further evidence...

[Samschnooks]

SCO

Re:Further evidence...

[southpolesammy]

That's not true. For example, when I go to Sun's URL for the Sun Fire T5240 and click through to the section to purchase a server, you first see the MSRP. However, after I login on the account window to the right, the price of the server now shows my corporate discount. Of course, this assumes you have an account that is linked with a corporate discount in the first place, but that seems like a fairly obvious assumption to me.

Re:Further evidence...

[alexborges]

The diff is, IBM has no problem killing AIX for most of the market: theyll hapily sell you Linux and tell you their services rock for it (and they are getting better, but it wasnt always that way). Sun clinges to solaris like if it was a tecnical miracle and hey, look at linux, they aint that much different and that counts at the market.

And in this times of crisis, im just waiting for the gartner analysis that defines how did OpenSourceized IT shops versus full sun/unix/ms shops.

Now thats gonna be a mean study and will signal, finally, that the server is penguinland.

Re:Further evidence...

[DesScorp]

"Dear Mr. Schwartz: Please hire a real marketing department and see to it that your product line makes sense to the average consumer. KTHXBYE."

Schwartz is part of the problem at Sun. When McNealy named Schwartz as his successor, a collective "huh?" was heard all over the tech world.

Schwartz's gamble seems to be "give every piece of software away, and sell commodity hardware".

This is, in a word, foolish. IBM doesn't give everything away. Nor does HP, or Apple. They carefully balance their open source obligations against the need for exclusivity in some areas. Sun should be trying to emulate Apple in many ways (and IBM in some others), but instead, is trying to remake itself into a Red Hat that sells cheap X86 hardware, and this is a recipe for doom.

Re:Further evidence...

[thtrgremlin]

Well, anyway, as an unyielding, "fact" spewing fanboy, I look forward to history repeating itself a few more times

Re:Further evidence...

[ToasterMonkey]

Sun clinges to solaris like if it was a tecnical miracle and hey, look at linux, they aint that much different and that counts at the market.

I think this is exactly why Sun is having trouble.. They are so horrible at marketing their stuff everyone thinks it's just like Dell but different, or just like Linux but different. I hate to say it, but the only way to show Solaris's value is going to be getting dirty with Linux, and that isn't going to be very popular in some crowds. Look at Apple's Mac/PC ads for instance. Same thing there, everyone thought (thinks?) Apple hardware was just the same as Dells but more expensive, and that OS X was Windows without the apps. Works though, once you hit a certain threshold, word of mouth takes over and stomps out the ignorance.

Re:Further evidence...

[alexborges]

Look man. Go ahead and tell them to try. The penguin isnt going away cause of some mean ads by sun. Many have tried to seriously cause damage and theyve been proven wrong at the market (the MS smear campaing of many years spring to mind).

I know that yes, solaris has something to show for it, but software is software and thats all it is. Aix and HPUX have something to show for themselves as well, but their parent companies didnt clinge to them like they were the cross's nails but quite the contrary: they recognized the value in open source development model and made linux stronger and stronger to the point that it makes little sense to pay for ultraserious unix when 90% of everything is just plain not ultraserious and the part that is can be worked arround by some nice farming and horizontal scaling on lintel.

Yes, we farked them up beyond all recognition: time for them to recognize it themselves and move strongly to the strategy that worked so well for IBM and HP.

Re:Further evidence...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, but it's not only marketing. Sun has apparently decided to go into the support and commodity hardware market. In commodity hardware, margins are razor thin, so they really have to distinguish themselves.

The Thumper and Niagara-based systems are awesome kit and no one else can touch. Their T5xxx line also has very concentrated compute at very low power requirements.

Engineering is hardly Sun's problem.

Re:Further evidence...

[thogard]

What do you mean nothing can touch Niagara ? My brand new T1000 is 1/2 of the speed of a Netra 210 under the best loads we can devise for the T1000. In 6 months there will be no low end SPARC hardware that doesn't suck. The T1 CPU is only good for moving massive amounts of data around randomly in memory or running highly threaded code that is busy chasing pointers all the time. I have yet to see an example of either of those that weren't written by idiot programmers. I will keep buying SPARC hardware as long as I can run Solaris 9 on it and it will fit in my old 900 mm deep racks. I won't touch Solaris 10 since it has so many bugs the longest patched up time is about 3 months so I'm not running that on production hardware.

Re:Further evidence...

[thogard]

In the early days of sun they were doing things like everyone else. They were building 68xxx boxes that ran BSD unix. They started to lead when they did their own SPARC CPU and started pushing for faster cheaper and double the speed every 2 years. After that they and AT&T came up with System V as a way to make the hardware stable. I think their young blood has ignored the stability part since there are way too many changes in their current operating systems. The young blood also likes including everything in the Operating System and don't seem to be able to wrap their head around the concept of an Operating Environment (like Solairs) and an Operating System (Sun OS). Right now all of the security professionals I know are running Solaris 9 yet Sun will not do the two weeks work it takes to port that to their new hardware and that has costs them a fortune. Most large Sun shops don't need new software since their decade old stuff works just fine, they only need new hardware to replace older equipment or when they expand.

Re:Further evidence...

[jonasj]

Life is hard and the world is cruel. Always has been, always will be.

Wow... poor you :-/

Riiiight . . .

[Ammin]

A company whose sliding revenues continued to based primarily on overpriced Solaris workstations and servers that no one is buying is somehow going to magically "recover" by giving away Java or MySQL?

There isn't enough time in eternity for that to happen. What will happen is that Sun will declare bankruptcy in the next year, liquidate everything related to Sparcs/Solaris/etc. and its MySQL and Java "businesses" spun off into something that will take years to reach Red Hat size.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[tnk1]

Thoroughly unlikely. Sun would be bought out long before they needed to declare bankruptcy. Their star may not be in ascension, but the company has real value.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[Ammin]

I find that somewhat unlikely. I have family members who work at Sun (various layoffs are being announced today) and I get no sense that Sun has anything of value. Also, there's just no financing (unless you're a bank using taxpayer bailout money) for acquisitions of that type.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[UnknowingFool]

Sun is failing because they didn't adjust their business model. Linux is cheaper because its run lots of hardware including commodity hardware. While Sun sells both hardware and software, they predominantly make money on hardware. Personally I would argue that Sun hardware is better than commodity, however given the cost, commodity hardware is good enough in most situations. IBM and Apple are both Unix vendors that will likely to survive because they specialized. IBM does big iron which commodity hardware right now isn't good enough to get the high reliability and availability that is required. Apple survived because they sell to consumers with some sales to enterprises.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[Samschnooks]

OK. Explain to us why SUN's hardware is better than what is out there? I mean, explain it in terms that a business guy would understand; meaning, not saying something like, (I'm making this up) "the bus speed is faster" or "the memory access is faster" etc...

Why would someone go out and spend the extra money for a SUN workstation? I don't see it.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[BBandCMKRNL]

Thoroughly unlikely. Sun would be bought out long before they needed to declare bankruptcy. Their star may not be in ascension, but the company has real value.

Your post and the parent post sound an awful lot like DEC in its last few years.

I've forgotten who he was, but there was a guy whose posts in the DIGITAL notes conference were titled, "And the death spiral continues". Unfortunately, he was correct. I believe you are correct in the outcome for SUN.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[crowne]

I haven't had much joy from sun hardware. We had a project that needed to process large amounts of data.

A fairly expensive sun server with CoolThreads technology was procured. The application was deployed and the processing time was so bad that we started blaming it on the "CrawlThreads".

We redeployed the app onto a commodity HP server with CEntOS installed and the processing time dropped from 8 hours to 2 hours.

I dont actually think that CoolThreads was a bad technology, unfortunately the application was very limited to what it could do in terms of parallel processing. Most of the processing was linear, so the majority of the massive number of threads that were available from CoolThreads were sitting idle, and the trade-off for the great number of threads available was less processing power for each individual thread.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun is failing because they didn't adjust their business model. Linux is cheaper because its run lots of hardware including commodity hardware.

'Sfunny. I must be delusional. I'm sure I'm running Solaris on my cheap little Acer right now. Lemme see, yes... yes, I am. It's how I'm replying to this post.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't had much joy from sun hardware.
We had a project that needed to process large amounts of data.

A fairly expensive sun server with CoolThreads technology was procured.
The application was deployed and the processing time was so bad that we started blaming it on the "CrawlThreads".

We redeployed the app onto a commodity HP server with CEntOS installed and the processing time dropped from 8 hours to 2 hours.

I dont actually think that CoolThreads was a bad technology, unfortunately the application was very limited to what it could do in terms of parallel processing. Most of the processing was linear, so the majority of the massive number of threads that were available from CoolThreads were sitting idle, and the trade-off for the great number of threads available was less processing power for each individual thread.

You answered your query, Cool threads can be optimally used when the software running supports multiple threads. Throw treads and see the performance.

We have redesigned our payment system and subscriber for DTH technology and we got an increase of 60% throughput and a good response time.

Its was a wonderful Sun hardware, I forgotten the exact spec but it was T... Not sure what what number was.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Expect Sun to be bought out by AT&T, their biggest non-government customer. AT&T helped get Sun going, remember.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[UnknowingFool]

If you want an example, wikipedia has one:

At the time of its release in December 2005, a single-chip, eight-core, 32-thread, 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1 server performed similarly to a two-socket, four-core, eight-thread, 1.9 GHz IBM POWER5 server, performed similarly to a four-socket, eight-core, sixteen-thread 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon "Paxville MP" server, and exceeded the performance of a four-socket, four-core, four-thread 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium server. Arguably, this made the UltraSPARC T1 the world's most powerful general-purpose commercial server processors, when considering multithreaded commercial workloads.

Since then both Sun and Intel have made improvements to their chips but a Sun chip outperforms an Intel chip; however, if you don't need that kind of performance (and most people don't to serve webpages), an Intel chip is good enough especially when you factor in cost. That is why Sun is losing. Before they were pricey but cheaper than IBM. Back then proprietary hardware running proprietary software was the only model for Unix servers. These days, an Intel based server on commodity hardware running Linux is readily available, is good enough for most tasks, and is cheaper.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[Sun.Jedi]

First, in a friendly way ... nobody gives a rat about workstation class machines. Any fool can dump Ubuntu, Fedora, Windows, BSD, OpenSolaris, or whatever, and google up enough support/fun tools to get the job done and post on /. on most any cheap-ass 2 year disposable wintel capable machine.

So, on server class machines... number 1 reason: Support contracts.

Sun is one stop shopping; hardware and software by the folks that make it. Dell also supports RH linux through their customer care center, and I'll assume that HP/IBM do as well, but they are not RedHat, they are $vendor with RH knowledge and expertise. Thats a separate subscription to get RedHat support and you then get the RHNetwork portals in addition to standard phone support. So you pay twice (1 for $vendor and 1 for RH), and it ain't cheap as Sun's.

Number 2 reason: Reliability.

SPARCs just don't die. When they do, its very pretty of course, but it just doesn't happen as often as Intel/AMD architectures do.

Also, Suns do not often have the compatibility problems that Intel/AMD arch's have. By compatibility, I mean the mobo + raid + firmware + kernel version + PCIx firmware + BMC version = "unsupported" type compatibility.

Fact is, I've been admin on Sun's for nearly 15 years, been through the really bad 5/7 releases and lots of other SUN 'badtimes'. hey are nothing like the hassles I have to go through daily with AMD/Intel arch's. I'm in a 4:1 Sun:Intel/AMD shop, and have a documented (ticketing system) 5:1 Intel/AMD:SUN hardware problem ratio.

Yes, my alias is 'sun.jedi', I've worked on Sun's a long time. This was not intended as a 'fanboy' post. I'm a beer/vacation fanboy before I'm a SUN fanboy.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[Sun.Jedi]

Coolthreads are great for multi threaded apps and processes. They are really horrible for linear processes. You can see 1 of 32 threads at 100% usage, and 31 of 32 doing squat.

If you lost time/performance by switching to a Coolthread box, it's because of the linear apps/processes the sun4u SPARCs would chew through in no time.

I forgotten the exact spec but it was T... Not sure what what number was.

T1000 or T2000. Until you 'uname' it. Then it's a T200.

It can also be referred to as the sun4v platform as opposed to the SPARC IIIi sun4u.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[BitZtream]

Then you're blind on many levels, companies like Sun have enough technology that you've never even heard of (because they aren't selling it for various reasons) that they would get picked apart by various organizations taking the pieces they want. Then there is all the known technology they have produced and value in their products. If you think their products don't have any value, you A) Haven't been in the business of dealing with servers very long and also B) are blind, but I already said that.

Layoffs now days are hardly an indicator of economic conditions. You hire 10k employees, keep them around long enough to figure out which ones are worth keeping, and layoff the worst 9,550 that you have, rinse, repeat next year, you keep getting fresh good employees at the cost of paying a bunch of useless ones. But heres the kicker, you were going to pay them anyway, there were only so many good ones to start with, the mass of your employees are generally inept overall and can only do very specific tasks.

Several companies have announced layoffs in the last few days, its great to blame it on the economy rather than saying 'we had this planned all along', don't you think?

No financing? Are you serious? Stop watching the scary news and believing all the hype you hear. People are still getting financing JUST FINE, I recently refinanced my house to get a better rate, and my old rate wasn't bad! The company I work for just recently was going to aquire another business that was going under just for the hardware, and out of no where a venture capital firm jumped in and dumped them a good years worth of capital.

The economy isn't nearly as bad as you think it is, its just a great excuse to tell people rather than the truth. Those layoffs were likely to have happened regardless of the economic conditions, but its WAY easier to say 'we can't afford you' than to say 'your a twit and waste of resources on our planet' don't you think? Sure good people get caught in the collateral damage, but thats just life.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[HuguesT]

DIGITAL got bought out though, many times over. Many of its assest were spun off between 1994 and 1998, including things like Digital Linear Tapes (DLT). The company proper was sold to Compaq, soon bought by HP in 2002.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah. A slow VM running programs written in a fugly language. An operating system which most people call Slowaris. A dead architecture. And some enterprisy stuff with names like "Enterprise Java System Advanced Server Business Edition v8.0". Sounds like real value to me.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[Ammin]

I don't consider refinancing a house (and I presume you have excellent credit and some actual equity) the same as finding financing for purchasing a struggling business. Circuit City is liquidating in large part because it could not find financing on any terms. Also look at Etoys and any number of recent collapses. One venture capital firm making one investment doesn't mean there's significant credit available out there.

And as I said, I have personal knowledge of the layoffs at Sun, and they are part of a pattern that began long before the current economic crisis because they have nothing to sell. In the quarter ending in September, Sun lost $1.677 BILLION on revenues of just under half that. That is simply unsustainable.

If they have technology that I haven't heard of because they aren't selling it, I'd say that's pretty good evidence it's not worth anything. And we have several Sun workstations where I work, and a couple of servers -- sitting unplugged on the shelf because Linux is cheaper, easier to maintain, and has more software that we actually use available.

Fortunately the winner of this debate will be pretty obvious in a year or two. If I'm so blind, it's view shared by Wall Street that's now valuing Sun at $3.61 a share, down from a 52 week high of $18.

And yes, I think the economy is far worse than your rosy claims.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that this post sums up the situation quite well. As a desktop Solaris offers relatively few advantages, whereas for a server Sun provides a uniquely integrated product.

And while the server market is no small prize, it is because of this that I worry about the long-term success of open-source development on Solaris. Open source development relies on a strong community, particularly a strong community of developers. And while I have heard a number of glowing endorsements from IT administrators, I cannot recall a single developer ever commenting on the benefits of Solaris as a development platform. In fact, I think that it is fair to say that the Solaris administrator community is very strong, but that the Solaris developer community is all but withering. For an open-source project this is unsustainable. While the administrator community may generate revenue, only a developer community will produce code.

While Sun's recent efforts to improve the usability of OpenSolaris have come a long way (with regards to Project Indiana in particular), I suspect that there is a deep-rooted issue that is more difficult to resolve. Specifically, the Sun userland (the shell utilities, configuration files, headers, libraries, etc) is hopelessly outdated. I have been using OpenSolaris for the last couple of months, and I have yet to find a single utility (e.g., grep, bc, find, etc) that compares favorably to its GNU equivalent in either functionality or performance. Many of the GNU features I expected were convenient but ultimately unnecessary, but others were very sorely missed.

This is not an easily addressed issue. Completely replacing the OpenSolaris userland with GNU programs would very likely cause massive breakage at many sites, and would potentially compromise the strong administrator community. Conversely, I doubt that OpenSolaris will make any progress with developers while it retains the SUN userland.

Naturally, I'm am not the first to make these observations and the Nexenta project seems to do exactly what is required: it completely replaces the SUN userland with GNU utilities. So might we expect the Opensolaris to retain the administrator community while Nexenta/other projects build up the developer community? Unfortunately, I doubt it. The sad truth is that most community initiated projects fail. For such a massive undertaking as producing a viable operating system, commercial backing to provide developer salaries and offer support contracts appears to be extremely useful. Consider the top linux distributions: Ubuntu, Redhat, SuSE, and Mandriva. All of these enjoy commercial backing.

So my prediction? OpenSolaris will retain the SUN userland and will never produce a viable developer community. Nexenta will continue as a hobbyist operating system and will never gain any real market share. And in 10 years or so, no one will be using either.

I suspect the only long-term solution is for SUN to completely embrace the GNU userland. Initially, this would entail producing two versions of OpenSolaris: one with a SUN userland and the other with a GNU userland. Administrators could slowly transition from SUN to GNU, and in 5 years or so Sun could discontinue support for the SUN userland. Sun may have hoped that it could retain a SUN userland while community-supported projects offering a GNU userland would takeoff and become self-supporting. But it is time to recognize that this has not happened and will probably not happen. It's time for Sun to ensure the success of the Solaris/GNU userland combination by actively support a GNU-variant of OpenSolaris.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[rainhill]

I wouldn't be surprised if, sun declines and RH gains further, RH buying sun and opening up every single code Sun had ever developed.

RH gets Sun's remaining customers, seems like a good deal to me.

Re:Riiiight . . .

[HuguesT]

I agree with the "don't die" bit. It's common to see at universities SUN servers that have been there 6-10 years, almost fully loaded for years on end

This is the year!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of the Linux deskto

If Linux is how much can be made free...

[thtrgremlin]

... then Linux market capitalization is how much software that previously cost money was made free, so if Linux can be considered directly responsible for killing Microsoft, which I think is some peoples objective, that puts their market capitalization at $400B - $153B = $247B. That means Linux has 1.6x the market capitalization of of Microsoft just in Operating Systems! That doesn't even begin to include all the other great FlOSS out there.

Add to that the average wage of a software engineer times the number of man hours contributed to FlOSS, and you can quickly see how Microsoft is getting its butt kicked!

I love the new math!

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[sweatyboatman]

I love that this got modded Interesting.

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[Otter]

so if Linux can be considered directly responsible for killing Microsoft, which I think is some peoples objective, that puts their market capitalization at $400B - $153B = $247B.

I'm thinking there's more to the decline in Microsoft's market cap between the peak of the dot-com bubble and today's apocalypse than just Linux.

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a fool. What about Apple? They contribute far more to Microsoft's supposed decline than Linux does.

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[maxume]

Yes. In terms of absolute revenues and profits (rather than percent increase), Microsoft has been growing faster than Google for the entire time that Google has been a company. Also, Microsoft increases their revenues and profits by more than the entirety of Redhat's annual revenues and profits on a monthly basis.

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[thtrgremlin]

Personally, I think Microsoft is the greatest contributor to Microsoft's decline. Apple is picking up a lot of the slack on the innovation, and I think Linux sets a hard standard with what everything needs to be better than (or appear better than) in order to be profitable. Windows 98 was great, as was NT4. Windows XP was the best of both worlds... but after that they do not have a lot to offer than the promise of native support for DirectX, .NET and Silverlight which work just fine on XP? This is not meant of a ridicule of anyone that fancies Vista or looking forward to Windows 7, is just that for me, if you are looking for something more from your computing experience, Microsoft hadn't introduced competitively more for a long time, and after several years, I don't see a reason, for me, to try it again. Windows 7 has caught my attention and running the Beta 1 in a VM. I am impressed, but nothing that makes my wallet itch.

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[thtrgremlin]

It was meant to be funny, but funnier works too.

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[Prof.Phreak]

...and today's apocalypse

Who do you think created the apocalypse? :-)

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[hairyfeet]

I think it is more that they forgot where their bread was buttered. I mean, there is a REASON why you see websites all over the place showing you how to turn Win2K3 and 2K8 server into a desktop OS. That is because the business user, MSFT's bread and butter, has been ignored while they got into this multimedia pissing contest with Apple.

It is like all the business guys at MSFT was replaced by a marketing drone screeching "We can be as hip as Apple and as cool as Google! Really, we can! Stop laughing at me!" and the worst part is they STILL don't get it. Folks got used to using MSFT Operating Systems because that is what they used at work. Businesses like boring as shit, simple low resource OSes so they don't need to buy a gamer rig for their secretaries. Before it was all good- You had Win9X for home and WinNT/Win2K for business. But now they are determined to stuff us all in this multimedia bloated nightmare of an OS instead of giving business users a simple boring bloat free work environment.

So I have no doubt that MSFT will continue to decline. That is what happens when you ignore a large chunk of your customers. And I am sure that there will be many Linux distros willing to try their hand at the business market, just as Apple is wedging their foot slowly but surely into the home market. Maybe if Win7 turns into another Vista failure(which I personally predict it will) then they will listen to their customers. Until then I see good things for companies like Red Hat that focus on the needs of business, instead of trying to go with a "one size fits all" approach to every PC market.

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[thtrgremlin]

By your measure, a Windows 7 success isn't going to fix their problem. The best they can hope for is to keep the customers they already have, while a failure would be enough to drive them away. I had been overlooking a good point you made, M$'s multimedia pissing contest with Apple really took away from what they were doing well, and worst for them, Apple won with customer perceptions of their product. Linux has reined well over the server market for some time. Apple gives customers options, but they are far from pushing it in some self destructive way. Apple has taken fancy, sleek, and easy to use in a dominating way, and they sit nearly alone on the throne of the "best money can buy" designer label rivaled only by possibly Alienware. Linux is getting a good hold on the low cost market after owning servers and embedded systems without anyone really noticing. I warn people, don't get Linux for Wine, get Linux for Linux. BUT, Wine + DOSbox does offer more compatibility for Windows 98 and all earlier MS OS software than Windows XP or Vista.

Admittedly, Microsoft has incredible market momentum, but where does that leave them but to hope to keep who they already have? Children of Windows users? IBM had their time when they reigned all powerful in the computing world, as did AT&T and Sun Microsystems... I don't see Microsoft taking a different path. The next Bill Gates isn't going to come from Microsoft.

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[hairyfeet]

I think the problem can be traced to the merging of the Win9x/WinNT lines. They say how well it worked with WinXP without actually realizing WHY it worked. The reason it worked is it took a business user or IT guy all of 3 minutes of tweaking to turn the "fisher price" GUI and layout of WinXP into the boring as shit, grey as hell, and low resource using Win2K Pro. So for many business users XP because Win2K Pro V2.0. It looked the same, it acted the same, with a little tweaking it ran damned near identical to Win2K pro. And with the right program prefetch could make it run a little better.

But now they are trying to shoehorn every Windows user onto the same OS again, only there is a BIG difference this time. Whereas before it was trivial to make WinXP into a solid low resource business OS, this new OS has been designed for the ground up for the home users with NO thought to the business owners or their needs. I mean, honestly now, can anybody look at Vista and tell me with a straight face that all that bling bling multimedia crap was designed for the business users? The whole thing practically screams HTPC. And while I haven't gotten a chance to try Win7(and after being burned by Vista am a little leery) from all the screenshots I have seen they are going even FARTHER away from their core business users and into multimedia land.

But they are NEVER going to get multimedia away from Apple, thanks to that little thing known as the iPod. And you are NEVER going to make two camps with so little in common as home users and business users happy jamming them into one multimedia OS. If they only want to deal with one codebase that is fine and dandy. They already have the code for Win2K8 server and there are plenty of websites that will show them what they need to do to make it into a WONDERFUL business OS. So instead of trying to stuff all the Windows users on the planet into one giant glittering platform shoe of an OS, give the business users a "Win2010 Pro" and let the home users have the bling bling.

Because otherwise like you said Apple will keep dominating the high end while Linux will keep making inroads into the low end. You simply can't give the bird to a large section of your customer base two OSes in a row and expect them not to go looking for other options. If they refuse to serve their business customers I'm sure someone like Red Hat will be more than happy to take that business.

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[thtrgremlin]

My best and nerdiest friend has several Ubuntu machines and Mac OSX machines, and one Vista laptop he hardly ever uses, but keeps just in case he needs to test something on native Windows (He believes in developing and debugging his windows software in Wine because it can only make things better). Makes a lot more sense now.

Thanks for the discussion. This will be helpful in helping people decide what OS will best serve their needs, Ubuntu or Mac OSX. (If Red Hat or Solaris were viable options for their needs, I would not be the one they would ask)

Re:If Linux is how much can be made free...

[drinkypoo]

I think the problem can be traced to the merging of the Win9x/WinNT lines.

Actually, the problem can be traced to the merging of memory spaces in Windows NT 4.0. Thanks for dating yourself, though. Very convenient.

They say how well it worked with WinXP without actually realizing WHY it worked.

What? They know exactly why it worked. They don't care. They wanted to force Vista on the world, and failed.

So for many business users XP because Win2K Pro V2.0.

Actually, Windows XP is to Windows 2000 as Windows 98 SE is to Windows 98. Windows XP is Windows NT 5.1. Windows 2000 is Windows NT 5.0. See what they did there?

But now they are trying to shoehorn every Windows user onto the same OS again, only there is a BIG difference this time. Whereas before it was trivial to make WinXP into a solid low resource business OS, this new OS has been designed for the ground up for the home users with NO thought to the business owners or their needs.

You do know that you can turn off the big goofy GUI, right? Further, you ARE aware that most computers now have a GPU (even if it is a sad one) and that using it for drawing windows takes load off of the CPU, right? Right? Hello?

And while I haven't gotten a chance to try Win7(and after being burned by Vista am a little leery) from all the screenshots I have seen they are going even FARTHER away from their core business users and into multimedia land.

You can read tons of reports here on slashdot; Windows 7 is much less abusive to your computer than Vista. At least, so far.

But they are NEVER going to get multimedia away from Apple, thanks to that little thing known as the iPod.

The iPod is "totally awesome", at least as a force in the market. But it won't last forever. I doubt Microsoft will unseat Apple, but guess what? The iPod works fine with Windows, too. So that is a complete non-argument.

You simply can't give the bird to a large section of your customer base two OSes in a row and expect them not to go looking for other options.

What? Every Microsoft operating system is basically shit. You could make an argument for whatever hacked-up version of Windows is on the Xbox (many sources inside Microsoft repeatedly confirmed that it's just a hacked-up Windows, you DON'T reimplement Windows from scratch if you have a choice) being pretty decent - it may only run one process at a time, but it does it with style and some measure of reliability. But the simple truth is that both Linux and OSX offer so much more than Windows that it's not even worth trying to enumerate the additional available features. The price doesn't hurt, either (although Windows has been coming down.) Note that you must pay a considerable amount of money for Linux if you want to be able to run certain software packages on it (like Oracle) so it's not all roses, nor will it ever be until we destroy all closed-source software by simply refusing to buy it.

Don't give that much credit.

[jellomizer]

SUN's market was traditionally on High End equipment. Standard PC hardware has been getting to the Good enough category, and replaceing the need for the high end stuff. Even if the high end stuff today is that much more high end, we are reaching a point where we need less high end equipment.
the 80's almost every major university had its own super computer. 90's they had a mainframe, 2000's they have high end microcomputer based servers.
SUN product line has been between mainframe and microcomputers. Now their new stuff is either to much for what people need to too expensive for what you get.

Linux growth has always been fasted with the Unix Corps who are upgrading to a new network, and it is way cheaper for a Unix corporation to switch to Linux (or Old Unix to New Unix) then to Windows. (Windows to Linux costs a lot more).

Re:Don't give that much credit.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slightly off your point, but interestingly, "big iron" might be in for a bit of a comeback . I agree with you that the beige box looked poised to win out in the late 90s, but its rise was predicated on cheap energy to an extent most of us didn't appreciate back then. When energy prices double or triple over what they were last decade, suddenly consolidating all those generic, standalone x86 PCs into virtual instances living inside one, massive, efficient mainframe makes a lot more sense. Sun knows this and markets on it extensively. And companies who have opted for the thousands-of-PCs approach in their datacenter are doing everything they can to keep the price of electricity down--without it they're screwed.

Re:Don't give that much credit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Discolsure - I work for a Sun Reseller.

"Now their new stuff is either to much for what people need to too expensive for what you get."

  I have to disagree with this statement. Sure, Sun is not in the business of selling personal computers. And an individual is not going to be buying Sun equipment. But businesses sure are. Sun Servers these days can be SPARC, AMD, or Intel. They can run whatever OS you want.

We have had great success in replacing Dell in data centers with Sun. All you need to to is show the customer processing power, rack unit, cooling requirements, and energy usage vs. Dell.

Yeah, 1 Sun server costs more than 1 Dell server. But you need 10 Dell servers to do the job of one Sun server. The Dells will use 50x power and cooling, require 10x rack space, etc for an equivalent amount of work.

Virtualization is the key in todays datacenter, and Sun has the servers to host it.

All that said, the Sun PR machine is utter crap. They do a terrible job of getting the word out on this stuff.

Re:Don't give that much credit.

[captrb]

I don't think this is true any longer, at least not for their entire line. I just bought an Intel server from them that gave amazing bang for the buck. I'm very pleased with it and plan on buying a few more.

8 cpu's, 32gb memory, and LOM in 1U for $8k?

That's a pretty cheap server.

I wish they hadn't decided to shun the fastest growing unix community in the world by reinventing the wheel with OpenSolaris. They should have followed Nexenta's lead and buddied up with Debian & Ubuntu. As it stands, I'm destined to be in "hand rolled hell" in order to continue using SUNW Solaris.

Re:Don't give that much credit.

[thtrgremlin]

we are reaching a point where we need less high end equipment

I think it is more like people / businesses no longer need so much specialized equipment as your average cheap PC can do almost anything, and what was once very specialized hardware is very efficient software that runs on consumer grade hardware. Wasn't sure if that is what you meant, but that is the impression I have gotten also.

Re:Don't give that much credit.

[Anonymous Coward]

your average cheap PC can do almost anything,

I don't know what industry you work in but that seems like a dubious statement at best. Try running a CRM database for only 30 people on your "cheap PC" and see how well it performs. Hell, I cannot think of a single server function that we could use a "cheap pc" for in the shop I work at.

Re:Don't give that much credit.

[jellomizer]

I never said that SUNs stuff isn't more powerful then Dell, or even the value per second of full processing time is fare.

1. Most people just need 1 server (Small business is the root of our economy).
2. Many people are not sold on Virtualization Either they don't know what it is, or the one main disadvantage of having a single point of failure for all their servers makes them uneasy.
3. They want an escape hatch. SUN like Apple really puts you in a vendor lock-in with PC bases hardware you can ditch Dell and go with HP, Lenovo, etc... without having to do a major IT project.
4. 10x Rack space looks more impressive then a lone box running. Sounds silly but it is true, and some people make decisions based off this.

Having worked as a sun reseller myself I understand your view. But Combined with Sun PR lameness, Having pissed off to many resellers back in the 90's (You make a multi-million dollar deal, SUN gets word of it, contacts your client directly and offers them a better deal and you get nothing) most haven't came back, and switch to Linux solutions, as you just change your sales approach and your back in business.

Re:Don't give that much credit.

[thtrgremlin]

super computers have their place. All I was saying is that consumer hardware is scalable to handle just about any task such that specialized hardware is not as necessary. I didn't mean to imply that a $200 laptop can take over for your web server, just that hardware does exist on a consumer level to build to your needs on your own. Also, if say you no longer need that equipment for that task, because you are upgrading, or whatever, it can be easily used for something else, rather than just thrown to a shelf the recycling bin. Signal tuners, sound mixers, routers, media centers, and the such. They can have specialized components, but much hardware is getting more and more flexible. You can now build machines that can do any of those tasks, or change tasks much more cheaply than before. In the past, if you needed a sound mixer, you bought a sound mixer, if you needed a media center, you bought a media center. Those pieces of hardware would not ever do anything else. Not saying they no longer have a place. 15 years ago, a $5,000 home pc wasn't going to do all of those jobs very well. But a $2,000 home pc today COULD take the place of a $2,000 sound mixer under the right conditions for many, given the trade offs, it is a worthy investment. Those opportunities are reasonably new and growing.

Sorry, when I said average cheap PC, I simply meant consumer grade.

It might be interesting...

[zogger]

..if Redhat sold netbooks, laptops and desktops and servers pre loaded with linux that "just worked", all of it, no hardware gotchas anyplace.

Re:It might be interesting...

[gandhi_2]

You mean like Apple but without the gay part?

Re:It might be interesting...

[thtrgremlin]

Dell has really revolutionized direct PC sales. They are very aggressive and good at making up extremely slim margins with high volume and strong attention to supply line management. While it may all look like "computers", Dell and Red Hat are not even remotely in the same business after that. There is a good reason why IBM got out of the game. As it is, Canonical has a deal with Dell for Ubuntu (albeit one that lacks selection for my taste), and Red Hat has a deal with IBM for their high end machines if I remember correctly. Each working to do what they do best, and pairing themselves up with the appropriate company that can help promote them.

Re:It might be interesting...

[westlake]

it might be interesting if Redhat sold netbooks...

I can't think of a quicker way to bankrupt Red Hat.

You need deep resources to survive in the consumer market.

You need an instantly recognizable consumer brand name - ideally one as strong as HP and Dell, Apple and Microsoft.

You need to market your product aggressively - that means laying out the big bucks for print and tv.

Your consumer product ships with licensed media codecs and players - everything must be subordinated to making the sale. Your FOSS ideals will be the first thing to go.

You need shelf space in big box retail - all the more urgently now with the death of outlets like Circuit City.

You need the hardware bundle.

The gadgets.

The software.

The Red Hat branded monitor and printer. This isn't a market where the shopper Googles for a solution.

It is a market where the multifunction HP Windows printer leaves WalMart in the same cart as the HP Windows laptop.

The Creative Windows HD camcorder with the Vizio HDTV.

You have seconds to prove that your Linux alternative is the better long-term value.

But if shoppers see nothing but aisles filled with software and hardware for Windows and the Mac, you've lost it.

Re:Sun deserves to die

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you sound like a pro.

Sun has always been very bad in business

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that Sun would have done the wrong things. Their problem for the last 15 years has been that they have been over-careful of commitment into their own business. From business perspective they have been apathic at best, and I iterate the same I said in 90s already: I would not invest a penny into them.

They have not taken any steps to fix their real problems so far, so likely they will just keep sinking slowly until the company will be bought by someone who knows how to actually run companies. Perhaps even by Microsoft, who knows :)

Did anyone else read...

[Anonymous Coward]

"capitalizatio" as a mashup of "capitalism" and "fellatio"???

Re:Did anyone else read...

[msuarezalvarez]

mashup?! *sigh*

its all about speculation...

[thtrgremlin]

...but it is also about opportunity. It may hinge on the whims of hype, but it is very similar to a credit score. There are many factors that go into convincing someone to give you money, and of course only a part of that is going to be the technology, just like ideas are only part of an equation.

Ever known a person with a good idea that didn't follow through on making it into something?

It all comes down to predicting what customers are going to do. Unfortunately good talent, technology, and the drive to succeed is not enough. You need capital. Add customers whims into the whole equation and it is just one big mess where many people are trying to profit (including the customer that wants the best value product for their money).

So is it a big deal when investor confidence + actual investors + talent + drive + technology = a number nearly bigger than Sun Microsystems? ABSOLUTELY! It is good for Red Hat, Linux Community, and even customers. It boosts everyones confidence to see the most intelligent and greedy people saying "This is where I am going to keep my money". This in turn becomes better for everyone. Also, I don't think it is so much "better than Sun" that is the issue, but the fact that they have hit the mark to definitively say that they are in the same league.

It makes me as happy as something like this can when nobody is writing me the check.

Market cap is speculative bullshit

[blind biker]

Anyone with a brain (ok, it takes perhaps a bit more than just half) knows that the stock market, as an entity, is an idiot.

There, I said it. I expect to be modded down by Linux fanboys (which is NOT the same as intelligent Linux users, mind you. I like to think I belong to the latter).

Re:Market cap is speculative bullshit

[SL1200MKII]

There currently two schools of thought on how the financial markets work, basically the market is either efficient or inefficient. By saying that "Market cap is speculative bullshit" you are implying that you believe that the market is inefficient. Saying that "Anyone with a brain (ok, it takes perhaps a bit more than just half) knows that the stock market, as an entity, is an idiot." classifies everyone that believes in the efficient market hypothesis as an idiot.

Ever heard of Burton Malkiel? I highly doubt that most educated people would call him an idiot. Even Warren Buffet who does not believe that markets are currently efficient highly respects him and his theories of market efficiency.

The debate of whether markets are efficient or not has been going on for quite some time and there has been NO CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE to prove that either side is "bullshit" as you say.

Unless of course in your in you infinite wisdom you have information that everyone else doesn't know. If so, please do share. Otherwise, please stop jumping to conclusions that people are idiots.

Re:Market cap is speculative bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have the courage of this, feel free to short the one you think is overvalued and use the money to buy the one you think is undervalued.
Then you can laugh all the way to the bank and point to millions of reason why you're smarter than other participants in the market rather than just posting snarky comments on /.

Re:Market cap is speculative bullshit

[thogard]

I think when you can follow the money and see that much of the current market cap is a result of retirement fund pyramid schemes then I think saying its BS may be a fair call.

Capitalizatio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yes, I understand, it must be Latin.

Capitalisatio mercati RubiGaleri majoris capitalisatio mercati Solis est...

Re:frist psot

[Anonymous Coward]

Did You Know? After maintaining a vow of silence for almost 7 years, Red Hat Linux founder Marc Ewing now freely admits that he named Red Hat Linux after Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst's trademark red New York Yankees baseball cap.
Durst and Ewing met in Ewing's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina (Durst was raised in Gastonia, NC), where they became fast friends, sharing the same passion for low-level system programming.
Durst collaborated with Ewing on the first preview beta of Red Hat Linux before the demands of his rocketing stardom forced him to abandon his hobby and tour with his band.
Durst's position on the development team was filled by Damien Neil, and not many know of his contribution to the popular Linux distribution; however, a google search through the source code on Redhat.com (http://www.google.com/search?q=wfd+site:redhat.com) reveals many snippets of code authored by 'wfd', Durst's initials (William Frederick Durst).
Durst asked Ewing to keep his 'geeky' roots a secret as it would not lend itself to Durst's bad boy image, but as Ewing points out, it was "only a matter of time" before the origins of his NASDAQ-100 company's name were uncovered.
--mfh

Wait wait

[xenocide2]

Wasn't Sun in trouble a few months ago, where their market cap was less than book value? I.e. the market was sure Sun was going to waste whatever resources they had.

Market capitalizatio? Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Phew, for a second there I was worried that they meant *Market Capitalization*.

Good enough?

[Samschnooks]

Standard PC hardware has been getting to the Good enough category, and replaceing the need for the high end stuff.

It is as good as SUN and cheaper. Otherwise, folks would still be buying SUN's products. Say what you will about MS, but they have a good product and the most applications that run on it. Consumers are not stupid as many folks here believe; especially, business consumers.

No, I don't work for Microsoft. I'm just expressing my opinion.

Re:Good enough?

[jellomizer]

I would stand by good enough. SUN hardware does have some really nice high end features that standard PC hardware doesn't have and massive scalability too. However these are features that people don't need anymore or the cost of implementing these features are much more expensive then dealing with a PC workaround.

Re:Good enough?

[rbanffy]

It really depends on your workloads. I see SPARC boxes running rings around x86 boxes the same price range on highly parallel workloads.

Re:Good enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what you will about MS, but they have a good product and the most applications that run on it.

Which would be great... if Microsoft made hardware.

Re:Good enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

It really depends on your workloads. I see SPARC boxes running rings around x86 boxes the same price range on highly parallel workloads.

Wait until you get laid off from Sun and realize that there are no SPARC boxes in use out there.

Wonderful....

[flajann]

Now if we can only get Red Hat to support FS other than ext3. That snafu on their parts is causing us all kinds of angst at our shop.

In fact, my biggest grip with RedHat is that they always seem 2-3 revisions behind everyone else. I mean, come on! I wonder exactly what it is they are doing with all that money?

Re:Wonderful....

[benjamindees]

For major components at least (xorg, kernel), version numbers in RedHat are fairly meaningless. RedHat developers are constantly backporting and patching in new features from more recent versions and only incrementing the build number.

Re:Wonderful....

[Slashcrap]

Now if we can only get Red Hat to support FS other than ext3. That snafu on their parts is causing us all kinds of angst at our shop.

Oh, me too! I often gaze whistfully at all our servers and think, "Wow. If only we could get some experimental filesystems on these bitches, my job would be so much better."

In fact, my biggest grip with RedHat is that they always seem 2-3 revisions behind everyone else.

I don't think you've quite got your head around this "enterprise" thing.

Re:Wonderful....

[flajann]

Now if we can only get Red Hat to support FS other than ext3. That snafu on their parts is causing us all kinds of angst at our shop.

Oh, me too! I often gaze whistfully at all our servers and think, "Wow. If only we could get some experimental filesystems on these bitches, my job would be so much better."

In fact, my biggest grip with RedHat is that they always seem 2-3 revisions behind everyone else.

I don't think you've quite got your head around this "enterprise" thing.

I understand the whole "Enterprise" thing and the "Stability" mantras, but sometimes that over-caution can get in the way and slow progress.

There has to be a happy medium behind "dinosaur" stability and "bleeding edge" features. Damn it, why can't I have them both?

Here is the challenge for some would-be entrepreneur. Come up with a way to provide stable systems suitable for the "enterprise", yet not so far out of date that we can have something close to modern functionality. The first one to hit this happy medium will be well along the way to putting RedHad out of business!!!!

Come on! It is an intellectual challenge worthy of you!

Re:frist psot

[The End Of Days]

Durst and Ewing met in Ewing's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina (Durst was raised in Gastonia, NC), where they became fast friends, sharing the same passion for low-level system programming.

That made me laugh deeply. Kudos.

Article should be modded troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Did the author forget that Sun offers Red Hat on its workstations?

kapardhi

[Anonymous Coward]

Yaa, but after open solaris release !
things remain same.
Linux Guys are always Open minded ..
so Solaris or linux once it is open .. Thats it

Finally

[pha3r0]

2009, the year of the linux desktop!

Re:Finally

[shutdown -p now]

No. 2009, the year when the sun darkened, and darkness descended.

Re:Finally

[The Grim Reefer2]

2009, the year of the linux desktop!

I can't believe that it took over an hour before someone posted that.

Re:Finally

[pha3r0]

yeah I looked up and down thinking it should be there but it wasn't. Normally I'm not the guy to post that but well you know, we all want a YOLD to happen sometime!

So, how about GPL OpenSolaris now?

[metamatic]

The market is clearly choosing Linux over OpenSolaris. One way to combat that would be to make OpenSolaris GPL3. It would then attract open source developers, and have the bonus of ZFS support which Linux will continue to lack.

Re:So, how about GPL OpenSolaris now?

[John Hasler]

> The market is clearly choosing Linux over OpenSolaris. One way to combat that would be
> to make OpenSolaris GPL3. It would then attract open source developers...

OpenSolaris is already Free Software. I see no reason to believe that such a license change would attract more developers.

Re:So, how about GPL OpenSolaris now?

[domatic]

I doubt it would make much difference. There are two main reasons for a corporate to Open Source their software. One reason to build a developer community that they can leverage to make the products and services they do sell. The other reason generate faith in the integrity of the codebase and company; the code doesn't have to die even if the supporting company does and users can trust that software does what is claimed for it and only what is claimed for it.

Despite some lip-service, Sun appears largely indifferent to any but their own developers. The trouble outsiders have had with OpenOffice is notorious. In the UNIX world that Sun is catering to, Open with a capital-"O" is a major feature in a way that it isn't in the Windows world. These customers don't necessarily drink either the Stallman or Raymond Kool-Aid but being able to trust code for-basically-ever is huge. Sun is just establishing trust with a particular sort of conservative customer.

Re:So, how about GPL OpenSolaris now?

[metamatic]

OpenSolaris is already Free Software. I see no reason to believe that such a license change would attract more developers.

The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL, which means that lots of free software code can't be used to improve OpenSolaris.

End-to-End solutions are Sun's real selling points

[thtrgremlin]

No product can make money if you can't sell it. Doesn't matter how good it is. Call it marketing hype, but how is anyone going to know that your systems are superior if you don't say as much. That seems like such a screw up that the sales rep couldn't explain the whole "end-to-end" solution issue. Personally, I don't think that wasn't a gotcha question at all, that should have been prompted as a great opportunity for the rep to explain what kind of business Sun is really in.

But if Sun doesn't even know what kind of business they are in... one really needs to wonder how much longer they are going to last. I am sure any sales rep at Red Hat would drool at the opportunity to answer a question like that from a real customer in front of a crowd that would have influence over possible huge sales. Hell, even I live to hopefully answer questions like that! Shortly after Vista came out, I was at a Fry's Electronics, and a sales associate was telling this guy looking to buy a bunch of machines that Vista was the hot new thing and that he needed it for his business because everyone was going to be using it in the next 6 months when XP died. I bust up laughing and warned the customer that was likely the worst advice you could get to drive a business, let alone a speculation I agreed with. From what he talked about needing for his business, I did my little Linux/FlOSS speech, but really recommended Red Hat, and explained a bit about their free product with full end-to-end support, and that they could likely best advice him on what would work best for HIS business needs. I am fairly sure I sold the guy on it. The Fry's sales rep was upset and just kept saying I was wrong and that everyone was going to use Vista. I humored him and asked "So what's Vista got that XP doesn't?". He started explaining the higher system requirements (as if it was a selling point), and went on to show me Aero. I gave a long *sigh*, and walked away. I should hang out there more often :)

Those Who Forget The Past...

[Anonymous Coward]

This SGI old-timer wishes Sun the very best, both as through solidarity and because he doesn't like to think of Linux as the kiss-of-death for an ex-UNIX hardware vendor.

SGI proved that great tech and once-profitable business itself is not enough; Open Source can save you, but only if you go all in. Try to exist between Open and Closed and you will get torn to pieces by their gravity.

Re:Those Who Forget The Past...

[warsql]

Try to exist between Open and Closed and you will get torn to pieces by their gravity.

Sounds like you are talking about IBM there, except they seem to be doing well with that model.

Re:Sun deserves to die

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like every system admin i've ever talked to, so i assume you aren't being sarcastic.

what is it about that profession that makes those little script monkeys think they're actually the important people in the mix? reality check, monkeys - you are the technological equivalent of janitors. keep those toilets clean, please, and stop stealing supplies.

Bad marketing

[Jim Hall]

I for one hope that Sun not only survives, but prospers. Sun has greatly contributed over the years to the development community, particularly FOSS developers.

Sun has certainly contributed many highly-visible projects that we just take for granted these days: NFS, OpenOffice, Java, GNOME, etc. And ZFS is very powerful, but hasn't really made it to other places yet. However, it just seems Sun doesn't know what to do with it, or how to market it.

A few years back, I got to visit Sun for an executive briefing. We met with a lot of higher-ups at Sun (including Scott McNealy.) I repeated to whoever would listen that Sun needed to get their act together: Figure out an (easily-understood) strategy for Sun and FOSS, and move with it. Separate the hardware and software marketing; and at the same time, let me choose systems "menu-style" just like buying a Dell. Simplify your product lines and marketing. Release a consumer-based UNIX distro for commodity PC systems that has the polish of Linux (the apps are there - Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. - so for 99% of the population that's the "compatibility" they need.)

Yes, Sun has done some of these things, but not in a coherent way, and certainly not in a simple way. Things are just too hard to go through Sun.

Sun needs to get organized if they want to remain competitive.

Re:Bad marketing

[alexborges]

Thing is, they shouldve killed solaris and become a full fledged Linux or BSD shop with enormous expertiese on Unix and great services built on open source java. I think they probably could still pull it of, albeit with an enormous ammount of pain.

They misread the game and didnt wanna get their feet cold: this is what happened to them.

Kind of whats going to happen to microsoft and what is happening to music and movie distributors.

Re:Bad marketing

[ToasterMonkey]

I think you're seriously undervaluing Solaris. Killing it wouldn't be doing anyone any favors.

Re:Bad marketing

[alexborges]

Well, i like it as much as any other nix. THing is that they took ages in opensourcing it: too little, too late, and then the penguin ate their lunch.

Its not that I dont like it, its just that it aint gonna get much in traction cause most of the wetware is long gone and posting all over kernel.org: it would be too hard to get them to work in solaris.

Re:Bad marketing

[An dochasac]

And ZFS is very powerful, but hasn't really made it to other places yet. However, it just seems Sun doesn't know what to do with it, or how to market it.

Read only ZFS has been in OSX since 10.5, full blown ZFS is in OSX Snow Leopard as well as various flavors of FreeBSD. It will go into Linux if/when the kernel licensing issues can be overcome, it's already available via FUSE. ZFS is also used in several storage appliances by Sun and others.

A few years back, I got to visit Sun for an executive briefing. We met with a lot of higher-ups at Sun (including Scott McNealy.) I repeated to whoever would listen that Sun needed to get their act together: Figure out an (easily-understood) strategy for Sun and FOSS, and move with it.

What is so difficult to understand? Sun divisions have contributed more than 1/2 of the OpenSource code out there (OpenOffice, Java, VirtualBox, MySQL, OpenSolaris...) Sun is a systems company. That code is out there so the world doesn't end up locked into systems built around Microsoft and Wintel fat clients. Where I think Sun could improve is in selling support and integration services for RedHat, OSX other *nixes. Sun definitely has the expertise and some Sun employees have expertise in enough *nix variants that they won't paint you into a corner. In fact, anyone who has ever been involved with porting from Linux to Solaris will tell you that step #1 is improve the quality of the code, Solaris/Forte doesn't let coders get away with the kind of sloppiness that gcc/Linux does.

Separate the hardware and software marketing; and at the same time, let me choose systems "menu-style" just like buying a Dell. Simplify your product lines and marketing. Release a consumer-based UNIX distro for commodity PC systems that has the polish of Linux (the apps are there - Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. - so for 99% of the population that's the "compatibility" they need.)

Have you been watching Nexenta or OpenSolaris 2008.11? This X86/desktop "usability" gap has closed significantly and if you're using Linux for a server, you really need to look at OpenSolaris, ZFS admin is far easier than anything you'll find on RHEL, svcadm takes the randomness out of system services and dtrace is awesome for diagnosing issues in production systems.

Sun needs to get organized if they want to remain competitive.

I agree wholeheartedly!

Re:Bad marketing

[evilviper]

Sun has certainly contributed many highly-visible projects that we just take for granted these days: NFS, OpenOffice, Java, GNOME, etc

NFS was a long time ago.
OpenOffice was bloated from the start, and continues to suffer through complete lack of direction. It's almost a shame OpenOffice came out when it did, and by and large hobbled the development of the vastly lighter-weight Office apps. AbiWord & Gnumeric, KOffice, etc.
Java was vastly overdue and almost completely reverse engineered before Sun finally released something.
Sun most certainly didn't give us GNOME. In fact it was much better all-around before Sun adopted it, though that may be coincidental.

Re:Bad marketing

[thommym]

But why? Solaris is superior to any other Unix or Linux so killing it should have been the most stupid idea they could have come up with.

Re:Bad marketing

[thommym]

I think you don't really follow what happens out there. I've two boys, 19 and 16, and they both like to hack. In their community it's OpenSolaris that is the bleeding edge and Linux is just mainstream. You just wait...

Re:Bad marketing

[alexborges]

And daddy has nothing to do with that?

Yeah.

Torvalds has kids too, but they will be karate champions AND penguin hackers.

HOHO, take THAT!

(here is to hoping you have a sense of humor)

Re:Bad marketing

[ToasterMonkey]

And daddy has nothing to do with that?

Yeah.

Torvalds has kids too, but they will be karate champions AND penguin hackers.

HOHO, take THAT!

(here is to hoping you have a sense of humor)

ROFL @ thinking 19 & 16 year old children are swayed one inch by their father's will :)

Re:Bad marketing

[thommym]

Well, I've actually done nothing more than showing them there are alternatives to Linux. The 16 year boy was tired of all problems he faced with Ubuntu and is now a happy hacker with OpenSolaris 2008.11. Time Slider is really nice for kids hacking and then possibility to go back in time is A Good Thing. They both started out with Linux when they were around 12 when they found Windows to main stream (which they started with at around 7).

silly

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, like SGI was about to outpace everybody.

Re:silly

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1996, while you were fiddling with VESA drivers for l33t graphics on your 486, my 10 year old SGI IRIS 3130 had 3D accelerated graphics.

Re:silly

[DrgnDancer]

And in 2005, while I was working for them, SGI declared bankruptcy. They made some phenomenally poor decisions both from a technology and a business point of view and they paid for it. Having been great once is not the same as being great. That said, they appear to be executing a very impressive turn-around, and part of me wishes I'd never left. Hopefully the economic down turn doesn't kill them just as they are digging out of their hole.

Re:frist psot

[Z34107]

A thousand and one posts saying that it's illegal/immoral/impossible to make money from open source software will be along soon. They'll be followed shortly after by sevaral thousand more complaining that all corporations are evil and should be banned. In turn those will be followed by several million arguing that google are/aren't evil, or disputing the subtle nuances between doing evil and being evil. In other words: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. The tuna salad is off, by the way.

Wow! The Readers Digest version of Slashdot!

I call bullshit - at least in part!

[GuyverDH]

Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market.

According to whom? FUD!!!

Re:I call bullshit - at least in part!

[thtrgremlin]

How is that spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt? Sun has made a lot of money on Unix, and that market is declining. As many other comments have pointed out, in many ways Sun is not being innovative while I think much of the praise and speculation of Red Hat comes from a perspective of Red Hat being very forward looking, even if a reasonably new player in the game. Can you explain?

Re:I call bullshit - at least in part!

[GuyverDH]

Sun not being innovative?

DTRACE
ZFS
Containers

They continue to make money on UNIX (Solaris / OpenSolaris is still UNIX) but they make it in services (Support, Customization, Configuration, Installation, Maintenance) etc...

They make money on integrated devices - like their new openstorage platform, based on Solaris x86 and ZFS.
They make money on hardware that is able to run multiple OSes (Solaris x86, Linux, Windows (bleh) to name a few).
They make money on hardware / software combinations that stack on top of other vendor's products - like Sun Ray devices and Sun Ray Server - integrated with either Windows Terminal Server or VMWare's VDM (which rocks btw).

With a wide range of products and services (wider than any that RedHat can offer - sorry - RedHat doesn't make their own hardware), I can't see how anyone can claim declining for Sun, and increasing for RedHat, when RedHat's product line is so narrow.

Re:I call bullshit - at least in part!

[thtrgremlin]

Ok, excellent points.

I love Solaris, but I think the point a lot of people were making (ok, this does sound very FUDish) is that it is a bunch of nerds in a basement. Solaris is AWESOME! Sun hardware is AWESOME! They also have a huge staff of nerds that can show you how to do ANYTHING! If I had the smarts to work at any company of my choice, I think Google would be my only pick over Sun as far as people I could only wish to be as smart and as innovative as.

but...

Who really knows that beyond you or I, Slashdot, and maybe every nerd on the planet? That is the problem and where they lack innovation. Ask the average person on the street what they love about Windows Media Center and you could get a wide range of answers, even though they don't know anything about what is going on behind the scenes or how any of that works, or what is GUI and what is making it work (or not work). Ask the same people what they think of DTRACE or ZFS, and I am sure you will mostly get a blank stare. I doubt many people off the street would even know you are talking about computers. I am sure there are at least a few people that that asked what the difference between NTFS and FAT file systems they would say that NTFS is 'newer' or 'better', but unlikely anyone would say why.

Is this an unfair comparison? Of course it is, but it is a reality that impressions and exposure are everything.

Someone else mentioned being at a Sun seminar (or whatever) and after the whole speech someone asked "Why don't we just use your free stuff on someone else's cheaper hardware?" and the rep was totally lost for words. Sometimes I think smart people forget that dumb things work. Everyone knows Microsoft because they brand EVERYTHING they can, so does Apple and Intel. Sure, they have the power and money to do that now, but they have been doing it since they were nothing. How smart would you need to come up with "Intel Inside"? Was that just a freak accident that it worked?

They are missing an edge, and it isn't for lack of technology or business innovation, but they do lack marketing innovation. As great as they are, I think Sun id perceived as old. People need to know they are still "Sun Microsystems, building the future". But maybe they are marketing to the right people rather than anyone I would necessarily know. I think Sun needs its own NASCAR vehicle.

Re:I call bullshit - at least in part!

[multiplexo]

Thank you. Has any of you fucking RedHat fanbois ever tried to get support for an Oracle problem on a Dell server running RedHat? Good luck with that. You'll end up in a goddamned finger pointing contest between Dell, RedHat and Oracle. If you're running Solaris on a Sparc on the other hand Sun owns the problem from start to finish. If you have a Sun support contract and open a ticket for an OS or hardware problem and it turns out to be a problem with the application that the system is running Sun will own the ticket from end to end, they will work with the application vendor until your problem is resolved. RedHat claims to do this, but they suck at it.

I ended up going with Linux on my new database servers due to Oracle's stupid core multiplier licensing bullshit, but I'm not running RedHat, I'm running Oracle Enterprise Linux, because that way I have one less throat to choke.

My backup environment runs NetBackup on Solaris servers, if you have mission critical applications then Sun's support beats RedHat like a red-headed stepchild on a rented mule. As far as RedHat being innovative please show me one thing that RedHat has done that's as innovative as DTrace, ZFS or containers.

What about SCO?

[G Morgan]

When will SCO surpass Sun? Who else has the brilliant plan of charging $699 for something other people are giving away for free. Imagine it, SCO are making that much more for every copy of Linux they shift.

Surely this unique and exciting business plan of charging more than the opposition must eventually pay dividends.

Re:End-to-End solutions are Sun's real selling poi

[Anonymous Coward]

He started explaining the higher system requirements (as if it was a selling point), and went on to show me Aero. I gave a long *sigh*, and walked away. I should hang out there more often :)

Get a life, loser!

Your opinion is worth squat.

[jotaeleemeese]

Can any MS based servers be configured to divide resources on "virtual" machines before the operating system is booted?

And then each one of those virtual machines can run a couple of dozen instances of a operating system?

And then can you assign on the fly CPUs, memory or I/O cards to any of your initial virtual machines?

Can actually any Linux machines do this?

You guys talk about desktops like if getting the latest version of Gnome working was the coolest thing regarding technology. That is not Sun's beef, Sun's realm is completely different, but clearly its main clients (specially banks) are being hit specially badly, but the stuff Sun does is tremendously cool, if you are technically skilled to understand what it is.

Re:Your opinion is worth squat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can any MS based servers be configured to divide resources on "virtual" machines before the operating system is booted?

Yes:

http://www.unisys.com/products/enterprise__servers/high_d_end__servers/features.htm

It's been available since Windows 2000.

Re:Your opinion is worth squat.

[drinkypoo]

the stuff Sun does is tremendously cool, if you are technically skilled to understand what it is.

The subtext here being that you are of course THAT FUCKING COOL. Can I KISS YOUR BOOTS?

The stuff Sun does is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Why? Because these days you can cluster a database, or a web application, or practically fucking anything. PC compute nodes with tons of RAM and multiple processors are now practically free. The power requirements are now the driving factor and you can buy used dual Opteron 1U servers for like $125 because no one even wants to run them (I paid about $50 more, about two months too early. What a sucker I am.) Blade servers are everywhere and there's no compelling reason whatsoever to buy them from Sun.

All that nifty partitioning shit is going away along with massively multiprocessor computers, and good riddance. Oh sure, they're not going completely away, but we have seen that most of the most complicated problems are amenable to being worked out by a cluster.

So?

[jotaeleemeese]

The realms of each company are not comparable.

Sun's bread and butter has been with the sector of the economy that has being hit the worst by the financial meltdown: banks.

If Sun can hang on long enough for the Financial industry to be sorted out, they will be back because they have technical offerings that cheap hardware manufacturers and Linux providers can only dream about (ZFS, dtrace, SMF, self healing, M series, honestly, this is cool stuff that actually have the potential to save tons of money to big companies. Sun is perhaps the only hardware manufacturer trying to drive the amount of energy servers need to work down. Anybody that has been close to any seriously sized datacentre knows that this is vital for the future of computing. Cheap PCs that have not at their heart energy considerations may fail at the end to replace big iron for this only reason).

That assumes of course.....

[PontifexMaximus]

that Sun doesn't continue on it's current present course of screwing up every open source project they have. MySQL anyone? The stagnation of OpenOffice? Personally, I hope Scott McNealy and crew DIAF.

Relative to what?

[DesScorp]

Sun has been a great innovator, but when they were the only game in town they charged obscene prices for their products and services. It helped open the door for Linux and Sun has only itself to blame.

When you walked into a data center ten years ago all you saw were Sun servers. Where I work now I'm hard pressed to find a single Sun box anywhere.

Sun was expensive compared to what? Windows boxes? Linux boxes that came later? Sun became the huge company it was because they were far more affordable than what IBM and Digital was charging in the 80s, and everyone ran to them. It's kind of hard to blame Sun because some guy in Finland came up with an alternative that ran on El Cheapo X86 hardware, and then gave it away to the whole world.

Re:Relative to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Linux became viable, Sun was among the first to become aware that big apps like Oracle were being ported. It was a golden opportunity to come out with a Sun Linux and support it along with Solaris. It would have let them tap into smaller markets and crush Red Hat.

Instead they tried like hell to prop up their massively profitable Sparc platform. For smaller projects everybody went straight to Linux, or even Windows. Now... who in their right mind would buy Sparc hardware over HP or Dell servers running Red Hat?

There are of course cases where Sun is the clear favorite and worth the expense, but before too long Linux will catch up.

Re:Relative to what?

[HuguesT]

actually HP or Dell servers running Solaris.

Re:Relative to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now... who in their right mind would buy Sparc hardware over HP or Dell servers running Red Hat?

I work with telco gear where the cost of an hour's outage can be measured in millions. Much of the newer software for them is written in Java, which is nice and stable when running on a Sun JVM under Sun Solaris on Sun's Sparc/x86 platform. However, the same software suffers from mysterious freezes and crashes when running on Red Hat Linux, and an insanely complicated yearlong four-way fight between Red Hat (OS), Sun (JVM), IBM (hardwave) and our company still hasn't figured out who is to blame -- and has already cost much more than the small premium for going with Sun would originally have.

Re:Relative to what?

[evilviper]

It's kind of hard to blame Sun because some guy in Finland came up with an alternative that ran on El Cheapo X86 hardware, and then gave it away to the whole world.

If it wasn't Linux, it would have been BSD. It's a mere fluke of fate that Linux took off first, and gained critical mass quickly.

Yes, Sun CAN be blamed for BSD... Bill Joy in particular. Just look it up.

And yes, Sun CAN be blamed for failing miserably to notice that x86 hardware was quickly catching up in features, while staying vastly lower in price. What kind of a company are you if you don't notice your competitor selling cheap knock-offs is quickly matching your own products at a fraction of the price?

Re:Relative to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows and Linux run on Suns x86 hardware, which is as good or better than Dell or HP equipment.

They're not the niche Sparc+Solaris monster anymore, and haven't been for a long time.

I see the new sun as a big software company that contributes a LOT to free software (OpenOffice, Java, OpenSolaris, etc... anyone?). They also sell nice x86 hardware and some Sparc equipment for those that want it.

Re:Relative to what?

[drinkypoo]

It's a mere fluke of fate that Linux took off first, and gained critical mass quickly.

No, it really isn't. It's because of the license.

Whether you love or hate the GPL, it's the reason that so many contributed so much so fast so early in Linux's development. After that, you can blame a lot of it on inertia - after a certain point, Linux began doing more for the GPL than the other way around (Arguably.) But one hand washes the other.

Re:Relative to what?

[evilviper]

Whether you love or hate the GPL, it's the reason that so many contributed so much so fast so early in Linux's development.

Not true in the slightest. The GPL wasn't even on the radar. People were contributing before Linus chose to use the GPL, and there was no magical jump in contributors when he made the change.

Well, ya

[zogger]

Umm,. I know Dell and Redhat aren't in the same business. The article was more about Sun and Redhat. Sun sells software, services and hardware. Redhat only sells two of those things so far. That's why I thought it might be interesting if they took a crack at opening up the last leg of that tripod. I *do* know I would be more inclined to get hardware from Redhat knowing it just worked with Linux than getting a similar situation from Dell or Sun. Any place that advertises that they recommend Vista on the top of the "linux pre installed" hardware pages (that would be Dell) in their online catalog isn't really all that serious about it. They offer a few models, but that's about it, sort of a generic minimal effort sop to that market. Whereas if Redhat did it, they would most likely take it *very* seriously. Would it be worth say a 50 buck premium over a similar specced Dell offering (and just about anyone could beat sun on hardware prices)? I think so, especially if they shipped with the real long term supported redhat and not perpetual betaware Fedora. I use Fedora now but it is always a crapshoot every release, it is a fine line between brilliant and a steaming pile, because that is what it is, experimental, it's never stable. If I could get a decent specced machine from Redhat with a solid multi year supported distro on it and it all "just worked" out of the box..that would be quite tempting.

Re:Well, ya

[thtrgremlin]

Do you think they could successfully do this assembling and shipping in-house, or find a company like Dell to put their orders together, where it is the Red Hat web site, branded Red Hat, but actually Dell machines? Like many off-brand companies or grocery brand items aren't actually MADE by any subsidiary. Would you have the same trust in that case that Red Hat would provide as excellent support as if they built and tested every machine themselves? Would this be better than, say, a web page telling people which models and such from various distributors are fully supported by Red Hat, and what types of device / brands / models to avoid to help people judge if an unlisted model would likely be fully supported?

Great Joke

[afabbro]

Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun's market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat's.

Bwwwwwwahahahahahahaha. "Likely" if you are a Jonathan Schwartz sock puppet account. Unlikely if you've followed Sun's dismal performance for any length of time.

Re:frist psot

[edittard]

Slashdot in a nutshell? Or maybe not.

I'd like to see what they'd put on the cover.

Re:End-to-End solutions are Sun's real selling poi

[thtrgremlin]

Maybe you had to be there, but even if you totally love Vista, you would have had argument with this guy. It was a used car salesmen sell, and was not answering the guy's questions at all.

I should hang out there more often

obvious sarcasm?

yeah, interconnects/memory are the differentiator

[Trepidity]

There's a sweet spot between 1-to-4-threaded apps (which x86 does very well) and trivially parallelizable apps (which x86 clusters do very well), where you need a ton of CPUs/cores in the same box, with a whole shitload of RAM and fast interconnects. That's the only real niche where non-x86 stuff has survived, because at the moment you can't really get a 64-way x86 box with a few hundred gigs of RAM. So it's what's being pushed by POWER6, the remaining SPARC lines, and Cray (which has survived basically by transforming from a vector-CPU designer into a designer of interconnects).

To some extent this class of architectures has always had that strength---when I read old OS benchmark papers, I'm sometimes surprised by how, even though the CPUs are obviously dated (quoting e.g. 300 MHz clock speeds), the rest of the specs are vaguely modern (that 300 MHz UltraSPARC might have been in an 8-way configuration with a gig of RAM).

But they used to also be able to sell cut-down versions as more normal servers and workstations---a 1-CPU or 2-CPU UltraSPARC was a perfectly reasonable server or workstation. The x86 commodity hardware has totally destroyed that market, which kills economies of scale for these non-x86 architectures, since now they have only the much smaller highly-SMP market.

Re:Bad marketing GNOME???!!!!!

[rubycodez]

they didn't contribute GNOME. In fact, one might say they so far as to try to steal it, passing it off as the "Sun Java Desktop", when it wasn't Sun's and isn't Java based.

Sun's previous hostile attitude toward FOSS including FUDing Linux and financing Linux's enemies has really come to bite them in the ass, now they want to be FOSS leader but it's too little too late.

yep

[zogger]

Yes, I think they could do the assembly and shipping in house, at least for desktops and servers, notebooks and netbooks would come just premade, nothing much there to it, they will of necessity all be coming intact from Asia someplace. They just need guys onsite to insure quality and to have that quality warranted with whatever manufacturer they pick.

    The economy in the US is awash in reasonably technical people who need a job now. They need a few people to really make intelligent decisions on the hardware, and to coordinate that with the software devs they already have to get to the "just freeking works, guaranteed" stage. Building computers is just a factory job after all, it's not that hard,and if you studiously avoid the typical east coast and west coast uber and oh so trendy high rent districts and have your assembly plant in the rust belt some place, you get cheap rent and reasonable labor and you can be picky on the labor quality as well. You aren't making any of the components, just assembling them. As to shipping, Fed Ex and UPS go everywhere, that is a non issue really.

As to sending people- joe six pack or joe business- out to do their own research on hardware, still too many horror stories about what allegedly works and doesn't with linux, its a moving target all the time. Check *any* distro's forums there. You basically *have* to follow the Apple-type model to insure the best quality control and to guarantee it "just works" with the software you install.

The whole idea of a big linux company like Redhat selling computers is they *would* be a better over all experience than getting some random production run from acme computer and trying to shoehorn something in. And again, Apple has proven that people will pay a reasonable premium over the lowest common denominator for that experience.

Re:yep

[thtrgremlin]

Maybe I am just overly cautious. Having had a few (although not wildly successful) businesses, and coming from a family of businessmen (whom have been much more successful), and talking to suppliers and asking business people for advice, the one thing they most all say and stress is "Do one thing and do it better than anyone else". There are always many companies doing many things. We see monopolies doing powerful things across a broad base, but that is not most successful companies. What frequently ruins companies is trying to do too much.

I LOVE your idea, and I think it would be really cool, but Apple has been in the game for a long time working on that image. Red Hat does have an image, and a really good one doing something very specialized. They have also had very little competition that has been able to keep up with them. Novell is still trying, but I think they are over extended among other things, and Canonical is looking towards a different customer base that I think could only make Red Hat's market larger, not take away from it.

Dell has dome a lot of things that killed HP and IBM in their bottom line, particularly in the inventory turn around time + time to fill orders combination was UNBEATABLE. At one time they even had customer service. Dell could deliver a product cheaper than their competitors cost. For a gladiator type match, seeing Red Hat in the game up against Apple, Dell, and HP would be glorious, and I would delight in following every bit of news that came by. But as far as Return on Investment, it just doesn't make business sense, imo.

Re:$1 Billion LOSS

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're looking for is PROFIT. Sun's profit was 88 million, or 11 cents per share in the last quarter (down 73%)

Huh? Sun posted a $1 Billion LOSS last quarter.

Re:yeah, interconnects/memory are the differentiat

[thogard]

Even the simple stuff the SPARC may do better. I have a sun x2200 with 4 AMD cores and 8 gig of ram running Freebsd 6 that I use as a shell box. I also have a two cpu Netra 210 (IIIi) with 2 gig of ram that I also use as shell box. If I open an mailbox with something like elm, it turns out that the sparc machine is 2 to 4 times faster and never seems to pause while sometimes the amd box seems to get slow for a bit. The sparc does a much better job of dealing with heavy and odd loads than the x86 box does. I use SPARC on my net facing systems since its stack is in hardware which makes stack smashing in C much more difficult than on an x86 platform.

DEC and SUN similarities

[BBandCMKRNL]

DIGITAL got bought out though, many times over. Many of its assest were spun off between 1994 and 1998, including things like Digital Linear Tapes (DLT). The company proper was sold to Compaq, soon bought by HP in 2002.

Correct. RDB was sold to Oracle.

Unfortunately, the similarities between DEC and SUN are amazing. DEC was always knocked for having poor marketing. We are hearing the same thing about SUN. DEC was selling over-engineered proprietary hardware in an industry where commodity, low cost hardware was taking over. SUN is doing the same with its own hardware, but is also selling in the commodity market. Unfortunately, commodity hardware margins are almost non-existent. Who's to say that SUN won't also start spinning off many of its assets.

Sun's missteps over the year

[br00tus]

First - Sun had a UNIX for x86 in 1992-1993 which was superior to Linux at the time. This is not hindsight being 20-20, my manager complained to me in 1997 (we had Solaris x86 dekstops) how Sun was screwing up Solaris x86. Red Hat only got things like a decent kernel crash dump put in recently - Sun really messed this up.

Secondly - too slow to embrace "open source". Red Hat did and now their market cap is about to surpass the company that did not (soon enough anyhow).

Thirdly - how necessary was dumping the Berkeley-like SunOS for the System V-like Solaris? I personally think they put too much of an effort into this, although opinions may vary.

I watched SGI get killed in the mid-1990s. People began doing low-end graphics stuff on Macs or even Windows, and suddenly SGI only became a company for the high-end. It was easy to see that this was the future for Sun. Now Wall Street has collapsed, and the big market Sun had has dried up. And Wall Street has gone from an environment where in 2001 Linux was just a test project, to where some companies are now almost all Linux on the UNIX front, and are looking to dump their "legacy" Sun stuff. It didn't have to be this way.

I first encountered Sun in the late 1980s and until recently I still had a lot of love for them. Red Hat's lack of things like a decent kernel crash dump bugged me. But now Red Hat really does have almost all of the stuff that a critical production server needs. Windows-heavy shops like Suse a lot. I know a lot of UNIX admins and shops that develop for UNIX, including in the traditional financial companies - everywhere the new machines coming in are Linux, and a lot of places are trying to phase their Suns out. I think metaphors of a Sun set are becoming appropriate. Sun screwed up x86 and they screwed up "open source" and now Solaris is going to be relegated to the dustbin that Ultrix and HP-UX are in. If you search for admin jobs on Craigslist, Solaris doesn't even have much of a lead on AIX. With Red Hat now having journaling filing systems, virtualization, decent kernel crash dumps, production Oracle instances that run as well (or better) than on Solaris, high availability and so on and so forth, I can think of very little that Sparc's running Solaris have that a cheaper x86-64 running Red Hat doesn't have.

Re:Sun's missteps over the year

[SystematicPsycho]

I am an Oracle Database Administrator and I've work with Oracle (7.3.4,8i,9i,10g,11g) on Solaris, HP-UX, Windows, Suse and Redhat and out of every one of them if I ran a business I would choose nothing else but Solaris. Solaris is a great OS especially for running Oracle. It just works, very rarely does an instance crash and the workload it chugs through is amazing. Linux isn't all cut out to what it's made out to be, it's buggy and nowhere near as stable.

Re:Sun's missteps over the year

[drinkypoo]

First - Sun had a UNIX for x86 in 1992-1993 which was superior to Linux at the time.

Having used both a Sun386 and Solaris 2.5.1 on an Intel board with Mach64 onboard, I don't really think that Sun has ever had much of an x86 Unix. But maybe that's just experience talking.

Re:frist psot

[Hognoxious]

Slashdot in a nutshell? Or maybe not. I'd like to see what they'd put on the cover.

A line drawing of goatse? I'll pass, thanks.

Oracle DBA that loves Solaris

[SystematicPsycho]

I am an Oracle Database Administrator and I've work with Solaris, HP-UX, Windows, Suse and Redhat and out of every one of them if I ran a business I would choose nothing else but Solaris. Solaris is a great OS. Linux isn't all cut out to what it's made out to be, it's buggy and nowhere near as stable.

Re:Bad marketing GNOME???!!!!!

[Jim Hall]

they didn't contribute GNOME. In fact, one might say they so far as to try to steal it, passing it off as the "Sun Java Desktop", when it wasn't Sun's and isn't Java based.

True, Sun didn't contribute GNOME, but they did a very nice usability study that GNOME found very useful, and helped move GNOME forward a great deal.

Re:Bad marketing GNOME???!!!!!

[drinkypoo]

True, Sun didn't contribute GNOME, but they did a very nice usability study that GNOME found very useful, and helped move GNOME forward a great deal.

So did the new network manager happen because of Sun, or because the GNOME folks ignored their advice? GNOME is getting less usable by the minute. I especially like how it's now super gnome-panel centric. That's just peachy.