Sun announcing up to 6000 (18%) layoffs
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If I were them, I would cut deep, real deep, like 50% lay-off, assume further drastic erosion in their margins (and plan to be profitable with such drastic erosion), and crucially, with a slim-but-sharply-focused R&D division, focus on coming up with innovations that people are willing to pay for.
Apple did it, Sun could. It has the heart of a great company faintly ticking somewhere deep inside, but alas, current leadership hasn't shown it is up to the job.
Digital corporation: very profitable minicomputer business... until workstations were good enough.
Sun microsystems: very profitable workstation business... until microcomputers were good enough.
It's hard for a business to get back to where it was, when the very basis of its success is washed away. See "the innovator's dilemma" (actually inspired by the Digital story). You're right though, that Apple has done it... seemingly by shifting its weight to a different aspect of its business (consumer design) that was present all along. IBM has also done it (from cash registers, to mainframes, to minicomputes, to microcomputers, to today) - however, it seems now to be consulting-based (like Accenture), which is a different kind of business altogether, from IBM's traditional office automation products, but which was always present (like Apple).
Convenient excuse for a company that was already in trouble. This way they can just say "oh it's the crappy economy" and hope to get a free pass for generally sucking (see GM)
Look, if they didn't make tons of money in the last 7 years there's something majorly wrong. I can understand if the last year was down, but the last 7 years? Please.
Sun is the only midlevel server company that innovates beyond buying mother boards and CPUs and assembling them. They make their own CPUs, their own OS, ZFS, serious storage solutions, etc. They foot the bill for MySQL and Java.And so on and so on.
Unfortunately, bad management can sink a good technology company.
If everybody else is using a free OS for mid-level servers, maybe there's a reason?
Java, OpenOffice and MySQL are neat. Know anybody who's paid money for them?
Sun's decisions in the technology world have been so bad in the last decade that you could have become rich just by watching what they do and investing in the opposite.
Yes. Java still makes money for Sun for embedded and mobile devices. The licensing costs for a mobile JVM are reasons why you see the rather unique approaches taken by Android.
Back in 2006, MySQL had $60 million in revenue, so someone's paying for it. Not sure about OpenOffice (or Star Office, that is).
my guess is that they only cling to life on support contracts from people who are still solaris/sparc shops (which i imagine they are still quite a few of)
Workstations with x86s pretty much eroded their low-end Solaris/SPARC market because even a low-end SPARC cost twice as much as a pretty decent x86 running Windows NT. That was the largest mistake - to allow NT to take a foothold in the low-end workstation market. This caused lots of sophisticated software being developed for Windows instead of Unix.
It's probably too late to develop a minimalistic low cost, sexy, sleek box running OpenSolaris out of a T1 or T2 chip, but I would consider such an all-or-nothing strategy to put lots of very cheap, conceptually advanced computers in the hands of students and researchers so to foster development of software that runs better on Sun architectures.
It's a good kind of vendor lock-in: one achieved by excellence. Sun is uniquely positioned to do that.
I hope they do. An x86-only world is dull.
IMHO, the Niagra chips are nice, but are fairly specialized vs desktop chips. They're pretty well set up for lots of threads, but I donno how they'd do on the desktop. They're still sparcs, after all.
We must be prepared to deliver performance on many-core machines because that's what the desktops and servers will be in the near future.
And that's why Sun should investigate cheap desktops that could be used to run and develop - they have a uniquely viable platform for that and they have it today. Any software built for those boxes will run better on their servers.
As a personal favorite, they should work their asses off to make sure "fashionable" languages like Python and Ruby do threading decently on those chips. If I have to select a web server and I have a US$ 20K server with a 4-thread x86 and a US$ 20K 32 thread SPARC, I will probably go Sun's way.
Linux is a fine operating system, but it isn't the end-all-be-all.
The distinction here is between the quality of their product and their understanding of their market.
Agreed though - I'm not really sure what HP do with Servers - more expensive than Dell, and all off-the-rack components...
I think it's an unfortunate sign of the times that the commoditization of hardware is threatening to drive one of the last truly innovative hardware vendors out of the server market.
Of course, it may all just be karma for the time when Sun workstations more or less killed the arguably much-cooler Lisp Machines way back in the 80s.
Unfortunately, those are not being made mainly because any pc-class computing device must be Windows-compatible.
There is hope. Canonical recently announced they have a complete Ubuntu stack compiled for ARM. Maybe someone can make a cheap non-x86 usable desktop or portable computer out of that.
As for Lisp machines, it would be very interesting to build one these days. Anyone wants to guess what a Lisp CPU would look like if it could have been done with, say, a 45nm process?
PCI & the Pentium's APIC took out a lot of the old kludgey stuff of the old PC arch.
IMHO, a removal of the older 16bit instruction set & 4 more registers would make many of us happy. Maybe Open Firmware :-)
Disclaimer: I use a Sun x86 box on my desk, and a mac laptop. So while I'm in x86-land, it's a distinctly different province than many others.
Anything else?