OSNews

With the exception (in some senses) of Solaris, Sun hasn't put out a decent piece of software in... forever... you can't really count StarOffice because it is largely an open source product with some added bells and some support.

Java and Solaris are the only things Sun has ever really started or finished that they can call their own, beyond the hardware... most of their software is bought (VFS, Disksuite, Red Hat Linux, Staroffice to name a few). Every other thing that springs to mind, they messed up - harshly, including their SPARC architecture which is now years behind in performance.

Sun has been dead for years. It's just still flopping around. They need to change their entire attitude, business model and method of working with their partners, or they are sunk. They don't need 18 months, they need to go back five years... any possibility of change needs an entire refresh of the company's objectives and methods.

Anyone that has worked with Sun (I'm close enough to have attended Access Graphics conventions in CO many times now, so don't kid yourself, I know Sun well) knows that they have made vacuous promises for many years, right back to when SGI was eating their cake in performance - once the DotCom bubble burst, they had nothing at all, and were no longer able to sell the outdated, half-assed software solutions that they have... and they let their UltraSPARC line die on the vine. Not to mention the hushed prejudice and Cisco-like direct underselling that they punished their sales channel with until the channel rolled over and gave up. It's sad. There are many lessons to be learned from Sun's arrogance. Without Java they'd be nothing at all right now.