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Ex-Sun CEO Warns Oracle of Death By Open Source
gearystwatcher writes "Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy talks to The Reg on where things went wrong, and acquisition by Oracle: 'We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share,' McNealy said. 'You gotta take care of your shareholders or you end up very vulnerable like we got. We were a wonderful acquisition — we got stolen for a song at the bottom of the Dow.'"
Sun just couldn't compete with Linux and Intel. Open sourcing wasn't the problem. It probably helped, just not enough.
The mistake they made was that they forgot (or didn't know how) to monetize the open source solutions they had. OpenSolaris was great, Java was great, OpenOffice was great but there was no option to buy support or custom development for those products. The only way was to go with closed Solaris and StarOffice which were quite different products and required IT folks to migrate. Basically they pushed OpenSolaris as a development vehicle for their closed Solaris which made for a bunch of OpenSolaris installs way ahead and more feature-rich (patch-wise) than Solaris, migrating back was a pain (or impossible if you upgraded your ZFS pools), installing Sun software on it was a pain.
If anything I would say they didn't open source enough of their products for it to be a success. OpenSolaris would've been great in a well-marketed product like Nexenta did - take the closed source out of it, allow for the great amount of Linux software to run directly on it and make it easy as Ubuntu. But their stock repositories were crap and hard to find requiring signing up to get keys or stick to the handful of community repos. Their HA and Storage solutions are still the best you can find in the market but again, hard to install on OpenSolaris and not very compatible with other software and systems.
Their hardware was also overpriced which pushed them right out of the market. I can understand the higher pricing on their SPARC products but not for their generic x86 systems.
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That is the point. Java is only valuable begause it is given away for free. If Sun (or Oracle now) tried to sell it, it would be nearly worthless.
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Exactly, and part of the reason the free alternatives exist is because Sun made them free (e.g. Openoffice, or Java open-source friendliness).
What Sun failed to do when open-sourcing their "valuable software assets" was to establish a business plan to go with it. RedHat has a business plan related to go with their open-source Linux distributions; IBM has a business plan to go with their Eclipse open-source software... Sun? even though I like them a lot ... it is true that they were not business sound from a long time.
They had the complete vertical stack (hardware [Sparc], middleware [Java] and software [Solaris] and services [cloud services]) but never really came up with a business plan.
Again, it has been really good for us (the open source community, free software advocates) but it was terrible for the economic viability of the Sun corporation (thus resulting in its end).
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IBM has seen open source as a means of creating "solutions" for customers not a money maker in of itself. Ibm views linux as a sturdy and inexpensive tool that it can spend money to become very expert at. Sun sells expensive tools, IBM sells solutions to customers needs using inexpensive tools. That is why IBM is very very rich.