What Sun Should Do (by a Sun employee)

I just installed NetBeans 6.5 "ruby edition" after reading this post and just had to come back here to explain why Tim's thesis of "we have many great complementing products to create a coherent whole" (my words, not Tim's) is mostly an anchor around Sun's neck.

I download NetBeans 6.5 (ruby only version) and the installer tells me it needs to use 145 MB for the install. I tell it ok and it asks for my root password and I give it and away it goes. The install gleefully tells me at some point it is installing "GlassFish v3 Prelude". WTF!!! Stop doing things like this!!!

About a year or so ago, I seriously took into consideration adopting Solaris 10. I read the basic install docs and tried to get a clean and basic install of Solaris. No such luck. I wanted a server OS and the default install gives me not 1 but 3 desktop solutions, multiple Sun products like a directory and mail server and yes, 3 versions of Java setup in a "great" multi-java install method. This was done to enable the multiple other stuff to work as sun's various products it was jamming down my throat had different Java requirements. So what would I need to get a "slimmed down Solaris install"? I would need to read through a thousand pages of docs and write install scripts. So what did I do instead? I switched to ubuntu server. Why is ubuntu server great? Because it does not have other products it is trying to "up-sell" me.

Sun thinks that because it is giving you some free tech that it spent lots of money creating that they have the user's permission to shove more stuff on the user. This is a big problem. If I want GlassFish, I'll install it. If I want any form of X-windows or Java on my server, I'll ask for it.

Sun is the General Motors of the computer industry. They used to do tons of stuff for everyone because their products and expertise were unrivaled. As the demand for big machines picked up in the 90s, they did well and sold a lot of stuff to a rapidly expanding market. But now that we've all figured out that smaller, cheaper machines are just as good, nobody can quite imagine how they'll regain their past glory.

And that's the problem with recovery plans like this one: they're full of fine ideas, and you could imagine the company picking a few and doing well at them. But could they even match the efficiency and hard work of their scrappy Asian competitors? They're gonna need some major inspiration to flip around a multi-year trajectory of slow failure. The bus just doesn't have that kind of turning radius, I'm afraid.

If I was running Sun I'd seriously look at splitting the company in two. The software side is shackled by the fact that they need to move in a direction that is going to erode revenue from the hardware side. As long as they are in the same company you will have a tug of war between two sides pulling two different ways and nobody going anywhere.

I agree with the software folks trying to become the best deployment platform for web software. There's a window of opportunity while the JVM is ahead of other VMs where Sun could pull this off if they can produce a super stable, scalable, easy to deploy runtime that runs everything from PHP to Python, Ruby and Groovy and make it a snap to deploy and manage. The catch is that I don't think there's any chance they will achieve this if they try and tie it to either Solaris or Sun hardware. That ship has sailed - hosting these days is either linux or windows for all but the highest top tier. They need to completely get over it and aggressively push themselves on linux.

I would guess their major problem is lack of mindshare. All other problems more or less come from that, including what appears to be a lack of focus.

They need to borrow a page from Apple's book and build a SPARC-based "Sun mini" that's cool, desirable and cheap. It should also be the obvious choice for a desktop platform for anyone who wants do develop for Java, Solaris or whatever Sun thinks is strategic.

Getting CMT chips in the hands of maverick developers is vital if they want people to develop for them. Parallel stuff is seen as cool and sexy and their CMT SPARCs are built for it. I would buy a desktop Sun to "test the water", but I wouldn't do the same with a rackmount server. If they have rackmount servers going for USD 2700, they sure can do desktops for about USD 1000. If they can make Ruby or Python do great threading with them, all the better as I have no real desire to program in Java.

Back in the OpenWindows or CDE days, Solaris wasn't a terribly nice desktop environment but today, with Gnome, it is every bit as good as, say, Ubuntu. The right people should start seeing the Sun logo more and the huge userland Unix-like OSs have is key.

And, while they are at it, the JAVA ticker was a stupid idea. Sun is, and should be perceived as much more than that. SUNW was not a brilliant one (as workstations were no longer relevant)

Good article, I liked what he wrote about the GNU tools and package management. At my last try a few weeks ago I failed with OpneSolaris again because of they ancient GCC version to compile the necessary software elements, SUN's cc failed on that code with a different problem while it's just fine on Linux or a OSX.

This might have been better as an email to one's executive team, rather than a public blog post.

I'm not convinced about being a deployment platform. Sun's repeatedly been eaten from below by "cheaper" alternatives of arguably lower quality (whether Wintel, Linux, etc.). I'm not sure I buy that focusing on incremental quality/performance improvements is going to be a winner now either.

Tim Bray is an amazing engineer. I used to work with him at Sun and I was always impressed by him. He played a major part in the evolution of XML.

Isn't this how they ended up with Java? FAIL.

Wasn't Patrick Naughton asked what Sun should do when he resigned?

Seems to be the new black - winning the mind share, losing the battle.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/java.saga_pr.html

Tim does a good job at highlighting some key tech held by Sun. But there is no clear thesis that even if there is significant adoption of these technologies that Sun makes money.

I do hope some of these technologies keep moving forward. I do not see a great way for Sun to profit from them.

agreed that sun needs to make some bold moves (besides changing the stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA) in order to get out of the mess they are in.

the changes that the writer suggests are bold and do require a new team and a lot of capital. looking at sun's balance sheet <http://finance.google.com/finance?q=java>, it doesn't look like they will be able to do much of anything. i think sun is sitting around and barely making do because they just really want someone else to come in and take over. they've been slowly cutting jobs for years in order to reduce OP EX.

This reminds me, in some small way, of the Peanut Butter Manifesto.

Except that Sun is (as far as I can tell) failing at everything they are spreading their peanut butter on.

Integrating JVM within Intel CPUs will enhance Sun business.