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IBM Doubles Rewards For Ditching Sun
Taking advantage of the uncertainty surrounding Oracle's acquisition of Sun, IBM has doubled the monetary incentives they are offering to ditch Sun gear. Offering $8,000 in software or services for every Sun Sparc processor ditched for an IBM Power server, the program seems to be paying off. IBM has helped 1,640 customers migrate from other manufacturers' hardware over the last year. "The program applies to Sparc-based Sun hardware, such as the Sparc, UltraSparc, and Sparc 64 servers, and also to Fujitsu systems that run on Sparc chips. A customer that moves off a Sparc-powered system running, say, eight processors would be eligible for up to $64,000 worth of rewards."
What a deal!
Huh wha? What about that is anti-competitive or monopolistic behavior? If IBM and Sun were the only source of servers out there, then I could understand the anti-trust comment. This is a bit ruthless, but it's completely legal.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Sun was shipping far more Intel product than SPARC
I work at Sun on x64 products (both Intel and AMD) and this just isn't true. The x64 products are doing well, but our sales are still predominantly SPARC. The long-term strategy has always been for Sun to place more emphasis on x64 products, but not to the exclusion of SPARC systems. And so far, x64 hasn't even achieved parity with SPARC, or anything like it. Why? Not something I'm going to comment on in a public forum.
A lot of Slashdotters seem to think that Sun has turned into a kind of white box server vendor. Even if we we totally abandoned SPARC, that's not going to happen. Our market niche is high-end computing, and always has been. In the x64 world, it means that in order to compete we have to do stuff that white boxes can't. This includes fancy lights-out remote management, really high computer density (anybody else have an 4U system with 8 processors and a half-terabyte of RAM?) and a greener machine with few plastic parts and a lot of power-conserving measures. These things require a lot of clever engineering, and are the only reason we have any successful x64 systems at all.
I have no idea what Oracle has in mind for Solaris. Contacts with them are, if anything, more circumscribed than they would be under normal circumstances. But in my own inexpert opinion, it's not a coincidence that we've been acquired by one of the few software vendors that's still serious about Solaris/SPARC application.
I used to work for Sun too, just about the time they acquired Niagara from Afara (IIRC). Tremblay left Sun to found a startup which designed multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs, and they came up with Niagara, which was basically 8 very simple UltraSPARC cores on a chip, each core capable of holding 4 thread contexts which could be switched in and out to hide memory latency.
This is how things used to work at Sun. Every so often, very clever people with "lunatic fringe" ideas would leave to found startups with VC money to realise the ideas, and Sun would buy them back when it looked like it might work.
Sun's in-house CPU design is pathetic, which is why UltraSPARC started to lose out to x86 in the late '90s. Given the size of AMD's team and their complete lack of funds compared to Sun, Sun should have had much better CPUs than Opteron/AMD64, but look what happened. Fujitsu did much better with SPARC64.
Buying MySQl was a bone-headed decision which finally killed Sun. They tried to buy a name for over $1bn and got nothing. As always happens with these take-overs, the lead developers left. Remember the Cobalt purchase? What about StorageTek? Are any of them left?
There were many opportunities Sun should have taken but didn't. For example, they should have bought AMD right when Opteron came out (but Not Invented Here! - and it took some pretty loud shouting to get the Solaris prima-donnas to get Solaris on Opteron) and given AMD the task of developing UltraSPARC along side Opteron. Heck, some of us wondered, if a 64-bit x86 can be made to go so fast, what would it be like if the x86-translation layer was replaced with a SPARC-V9 translation layer? BIG HINT.
Now, calling GNOME the "Java Desktop System" was suicide. Potential customers were saying, "Why would I want a desktop written in Java?" Marketing PHBs, I hope you have learned a lesson!
Why did they ditch a bunch of the standard applets and rewrite less featured and slower ones in Java? I remember seeing a 1-pager proposing to write an MP3 player in Java for the JDS. Meanwhile we were shipping xmms on the Companion CD!
Java, Java, Java, Java, Java,..... Blah!!!!
PHBs, you may be interested in Java, but that was not Sun's core business, despite what you wanted to think, and all it did was alienate the millions of dedicated Unix people who used Solaris and Sun gear.
So I bought some Sun shares in the employee discount scheme. When the takeover stuff was announce, the shares almost went up enough that if I sold them next year when I don't have to pay any tax on them, I'll only have lost about 25% of my money.
I could have run that company better... Every year, buy some other companies with a few thousand employees, have a RIF and get a write-down against tax. Great strategy guys.
Phew, I needed that. End of rant.
Stick Men