Sun Microsystems Reports $1.7 Billion Loss and Falling Sales
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The other day I applied for a job at a London hedge fund - a household name to a lot of folks in the UK. 20% Solaris, 80% Linux. Unusual right now, but I think it's a sign of things to come.
Sun is too big to become just another x64 vendor. They're not making money from Java, and Solaris revenue is going to go down, because a great tracing framework and a filesystem aren't enough to tempt people from a platform which uses generic hardware (a 32 core x64 is more than enough for most people, a 256 core SPARC is very, very niche) and runs both OSS apps and the proprietary crapware they used to run on Solaris SPARC.
They were pretty right about where the workstation market was going.
Linus started Linux at about the same time.
In the 17 years since NeXT evolved, NT was born, and Linux begat RedHat, Ubuntu, and Google. Meanwhile Sun just hasn't adapted enough to stay competitive.
Has anyone here seriously recommended any Sun purchases in the last 5 years?
Of those who answered yes, would you make the same recommendations now?
I think Sun as we know it is doomed, but they still are sitting on a ton of amazing IP - Current generation of SPARC, Solaris, Java, MySQL, etc.
Question is where do they go from here? There are strategic mergers with outfits like IBM and Fujitsu, but I don't think they are compelling enough... I think those will only really come about if Sun detonates and needs to be sold off - which I don't think is likely right now.
They also appear to have bypassed the whole "cloud" bit entirely. Even if you're skeptical on the cloud it might be a risk worth taking for Sun. It's a new market at least, and it's a growing market. They've got the hardware experience, Java and MySQL. These would all make a good basis for a cloud play.