Submitted by Sun CEO Scott McNealy likened himself to Steve Jobs and his company to Apple Computer on the brink of launching the iPod at a convention Tuesday, suggesting the server maker is poised for take-off. Sun has been on a five-year stock slide, having lost about 90 percent of its share price since January 2000. It has not had a year of positive net income since its fiscal year 2001. In the meantime, shareholder activists are calling for Sun to do away with its “poison pill” takeover defense and realign its executives’ stock option plan to be more performance-based, according to a Sun proxy filed Tuesday.
McNealy: Sun Is the Next Apple; Shareholders Take Aim at Sun
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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In denial or what?
Or is it the other way around? I would say Apple is the new Sun.
No.
Sun historically has been a great innovator, and a horrible salesman. It’s been bad at working with OSS people, and didn’t care much to borrow from their stuff.
Apple historically has been a mediocre innovator, most of it’s best work being taken from Job’s failed ventures. It’s almost consistently produced shoddy 1st generation products: iPod (bad batteries), G4 Cube (cooling issues), G4 ibooks (bad motherboards), OS X 10.0 (unusable).
From Sun we have things like Ultrasparc, Java, Solaris, and I think we can throw VI onto the pile. From Apple we have …. Quartz …. iTMS ….
It’s just not fair to compare them. The only thing that might be comparable, now, is their net worth!
Let’s see what else Apple has contributed to the computer world…
FireWire. WYSIWYG desktop publishing. Affordable desktop laser printing.
Yep, Sun has done so much more for personal computers than Apple could have ever dreamed of.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Well, in regard to make anything cheap, you shouldn’t go mention Apple. And Apple did not invent WYSIWYG. We still don’t have WYSIWYG. What we have is WYSIAWYG. And Apple still wasn’t the first.
And cheap desktop laser printing? Thank you very much all you eastasian companies. You did this to the world (and not Apple, who sold laserprinters to 5 times the price they were actually worth).
Really? Please show me where in 1985 a postscript laser printer was widely available for 20% of the price of the $7,000 laserwiter.
We definitely have WYSIWYG. The fact of the matter is, most people wouldn’t know or give a shit about it.
But…but…OpenSolaris…
what, you mean the ‘open-source version’ of Solaris 10 that doesn’t even come with a complete kernel, has no plans of ever having even half a complete kernel open-sourced, much less the tool stack?
‘Open’Solaris is Sun’s way of paying lipservice to OSS while getting free labour to develop Solaris. Just look at their license and long term plans for OpenSolaris.
But it doesn’t stop there, we were assured directly in person by two of the big wigs at Sun, one technical, one marketing, that Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris are nearly identical. Oh the surprise when we found that OpenSolaris contained SFA.
I’m an OEM – I use OpenSolaris, I don’t have to worry about all that GPL viral-hippy-freedom crap tainting my business. Personally, I *love* what Sun is doing with OpenSolaris, precisely because they stay out of my way.
No? You still have to worry about all CDDL viral-hippy-freedom crap. Don’t you just hate open source?
You’re an OEM? Really? Which one? I want to buy your stuff, no really.
what, you mean the ‘open-source version’ of Solaris 10 that doesn’t even come with a complete kernel, has no plans of ever having even half a complete kernel open-sourced, much less the tool stack?
Perhaps you should see:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/roadmap/
and
If there isn’t even half a kernel open-sourced then how did they put together this:
http://schillix.berlios.de/
Hmm…
the Apple II
the improvements in the disk drive
the first commercial GUI (and there were many improvements over Xerox’ interface)
fully bitmapped displays
AppleTalk
WYSIWYG editing and desktop publishing
Laser printers people could actually afford
TrueType fonts
English-language system-level scripting through AppleScript
Speech output and input from about 1992 onwards
ColorSync
QuickTime
Dropping the floppy
Changing the look of personal computers (starting with the iMac)
Quartz (render through Display Postscript)
Quartz Extreme (render desktop on the GPU)
FireWire 400 and 800
iTunes Music Store
iPod
… others I can’t think of right now
Not every one’s a gem, some are debatable and some are in partnership with others, but Apple is very much a company built around innovation, invention and marketing. That’s not to dismiss Sun, but it’s hard to look at computing in the past twenty years and not see Apple’s impact in many areas.
Actually truetype fonts came at the same time as in windows. It was something they did together. And TrueType is technically (or should I say mathematically) a very poor design.
What Apple came op with was a simpler and much more intuitive way to use the computer. But the software in each self and the hardware… nothing special about that.
The greatest news in regards to fonts, must be the fact that now-a-days your PS-fonts can have full unicode-support. But this is not thanks to Apple, but actually Adobe and Microsoft (unfortunately).
Firewire is great. But the rest of that list is nonsens. You forget to mention that Apple invented the Apple-key, and the key with the “Museum/Cultural place” symbol.
Apple never invented much, but what they did invent… oh boy oh boy
the first commercial GUI
The important part here is the ‘commerical’ bit. They didn’t invent it. Its like saying intel brought 64bit computing to the masses since they have EMT64. Please….
WYSIWYG editing and desktop publishing
Hardly something Apple alone were responsible for.
QuickTime
Such a nice player, I love having to pay to use full screen mode. And the features, nothing can beat that. I am not even talking about the fact you can’t legally view streaming quicktime content in other players. Quicktime, hasn’t contributed anything to the computing world.
Changing the look of personal computers
This was/[could be] done before. Marketing your design doesn’t mean you contributed to computing.
Dropping the floppy
So when Dell stopped offering 500mhz boxes, they did something innovative? This could be done ages ago and doesn’t represent innovation.
iPod
Wow big contribution, its so easy to use Ipod with my audio player of choice. And its nothing all that special, just good marketing.
Apple’s technological contribution is probably most impressive during their early years, when Wozniak did his magic. Now most of their stuff is just marketing and pseudo-useful bullshit that can be sold to the masses. Of course nothing wrong with good marketing, but that doesn’t mean that Apple is involved with innovation. They didn’t start a paragdim shift in computing, they simply imporved on known and concept were able to sell them to the masses.
Interesting that YOU think they are not comaprable but apparently Scott McNealy does!
“Let’s have an iPod moment”
Apparently “let’s have an Ultrasparc moment” doesn’t exite the shareholders!
What is this? Mania grandiosa? Next he will be claiming he’s the son of a Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Being compared to Steve Jobs hardly qualifies as a dellusion of granduer…
Excuse me, I am the son of Flying Spaghettis Monster, my name is Mangia Marinara.
“We have a phrase around Sun, ‘let’s have an iPod moment,’”
You’re just seeing the rolling thunder of all the R&D we invested during the bubble,” he said.
The first product Mr. McNealy mentioned was the Sun Fire X4100 server. He touted lower energy costs, lower heat production, and a lower price as features that made it an attractive purchase.
Wooo!!! A thousand eh… nope… it doesn’t seem to fit in my pocket! 🙂 Nice goal, but that won’t get any sane person exited…
Where did McNealy get his Reality Distortion Field? I want one too.
if he wants to be steve jobs then he’s going to have to start talking like him first. he must learn to properly use words like “super” and “really amazing.”
Only it looks to be pointed inward.
Intel is taking their oven roasted fowl to the bank.
These sort of antics are largely what made me think that Sun needed better management in the mid ’90s. That position hasn’t really changed any, only the absence of spurious sales that were present during the buble has since evaporated making it all the more apparent.
While technically Sun equipment is very good. They were overly aggressive with their Resellers, and cut our margins and if we have a big deal Sun will come and undercut us on price. While in the short term it was good for Sun but when you get your Resellers Annoyed with you they stop being a Reseller and then they will put their marketing efforts to other technologies. So what Sun actually did was at their height they fired their best marketing team, who worked for Sun for free. Selling Sun Systems without the Resellers Word of Mouth and have them pushing more affordable alternatives makes it tough for Sun to ever get back. Unless they give Resellers a legal promise not to screw them again. Then they might be able to get back.
Sounds sort of familiar…. I think lots of companies are making that mistake these days. Wait, isn’t Apple doing something similar by forcing their resellers to hold a certain price?
Course, it works well for Apple; but they started without resellers (when I say started, I mean when Jobs came back and saved the company).
Wow! I would like to know how they managed to waste the 1.7billions of dollars in research and developement. What do we have there is:
1. New Ultra… Basically the samebad slow CPU design as the predcessor catching up a bit by integrating L2 Caches on the chip and providing still glacial clock speeds in comparision to the competitors.
2. The wonderfull multi threaded niagara which will come out with clock speeds that seem rather rdiculous and with an internal anrchitecure just basically duplicating lots of G4 alike CPU design. I predict it will be just known for beeing slow.
3. A quite usual low end server. Designed outside the house and manufactured by the usual suspects in asia. Sun is playing only the label game here.
They are doomed I guess..
You should put your name to the nonsense you have just dribbled…at least we can then identify who smeared this textual diarrhea all over osnews
Sparc is so slow…whatever…have you ever owned or even used a sparc box, clock speeds are not indicative of performance moron. Yeah, thats right your crazy fast celeron does not perform any better (far from it actually) than any sparc on the market…funny that.
You predict it will be known for being slow hey, i’ll tell you what Nostradamus, contact me when this is the case and i’ll eat my shoe
Oh and in your infinite wisdom you have enlightened us all as to where the boxes were designed. unfortunately Nostradamus you are wrong again, go and to do a little research about Andy Bechtolsheim, the sun co-founder who actually designed this box. Then actually feast your eyes upon one of these boxes and tell me then if this is a taiwanese badge job.
it’s been loveley…
Ché Kristo
I’ve used many Sparc boxes. Worked with an Ultra 10 on my desk for the last several years. SunFires as well. ~500Mhz UltraSparc IIIi or whatever.
Are Sun systems slow? Yes. I built an 800 Mhz Duron system for under $1000 at the time, installed a Matrox G450 Dual-Head card and got a much better workstation for about 1/3 the cost of the Sun box.
Today I can get a dual core AMD X2 for around $800 and a dual core Intel 820 for around $600.
Are you trying to say that an UltraSparc IV at ~1.5 Ghz is going to cost less or outperform an AMD X2?
If you think Sun systems are fast you must be dreaming. The ONLY thing they’re good at is scaling to handle extremely large databases. For everything else there’s SGI and IBM and grids and clusters and PCs.
Sun isn’t leading the tech industry anymore. They’re barely keeping up.
Umm.. The Ultra10 came out in January of 1998…. And was basically a PC with an UltraSPARC-IIi CPU. The slowness you are referring to is more due to the IDE hard drives and PCI bus than the CPU. And you are comparing that to what exactly? An x86 workstation from 2005? If that’s the case, how about the Sun Ultra 20? It’s the lowest priced Opteron system in it’s class from a major vendor (i.e. IBM, HP, etc.).
You mention SGI and IBM… Oh Please… I’ll concede that the Power5 is a nice chip and it had the benefit of making it to market before the UltraSPARC IV. But if we are considering the here and now, then Sun has the best server line up of any of it’s competitors with its Opteron and UltraSPARC IV boxes. As for SGI, I won’t even bother, as they do not even belong in the same sentence as IBM and Sun these days.
I bought the Duron in 2001 and I’m certain, after looking at Sun’s website today, they were still selling the Ultra 10 in 2001. I had the Ultra 3D Creator model with, get this, 2 video cards. They almost were as nice as my cheapo Matrox G450, but they couldn’t give me 2 1280×1024 screens with Xinerama, so I went with Linux and the PC for my desktop and haven’t looked back since.
Sun’s problem isn’t that they came out with the USIIi in 1998. Its that they didn’t come out with a low priced USIII model until everyone could get a 1+ Ghz PC for a fraction of the price. Its not that they are releasing the USIV+ today. Its that by the time they’re price comparably to AMD X2s, AMD X4s will be available at the same price. Its the same problem Apple had with the G5. Too little, too late.
If Sun really were like Apple they would be moving their whole desktop line over to dual-core Intel and AMD chips and offer an OS as feature rich as OSX or compete on price/performance, which they have always sucked at. That’s why they’re getting their ass kicked in the market.
I bought the Duron in 2001 and I’m certain, after looking at Sun’s website today, they were still selling the Ultra 10 in 2001. I had the Ultra 3D Creator model with, get this, 2 video cards. They almost were as nice as my cheapo Matrox G450, but they couldn’t give me 2 1280×1024 screens with Xinerama, so I went with Linux and the PC for my desktop and haven’t looked back since.
Bollocks… I had a ultra 10 with two cards running my dual 21 inch monitor @1280×1024. Yeah right linux in 2001 supported Xinerama just fine! Troll on.
Sun’s problem isn’t that they came out with the USIIi in 1998. Its that they didn’t come out with a low priced USIII model until everyone could get a 1+ Ghz PC for a fraction of the price. Its not that they are releasing the USIV+ today. Its that by the time they’re price comparably to AMD X2s, AMD X4s will be available at the same price. Its the same problem Apple had with the G5. Too little, too late.
Sun doesn’t sell gaming machines… why would you think they did? I guess you need to get a clue on what companies sell and target markets before posting gibberish.
If Sun really were like Apple they would be moving their whole desktop line over to dual-core Intel and AMD chips and offer an OS as feature rich as OSX or compete on price/performance, which they have always sucked at. That’s why they’re getting their ass kicked in the market.
Like I said above, you need to take a college course in english where they teach you to read and understand things.
What Mcnealy is saying is Sun like Apple is innovating like crazy and bringing out industry changing technologies example Solaris 10 and Niagara and CMT processors.
If Sun really were like Apple they would be moving their whole desktop line over to dual-core Intel and AMD chips and offer an OS as feature rich as OSX or compete on price/performance, which they have always sucked at. That’s why they’re getting their ass kicked in the market.
Gee… wonder what all those opteron workstations are doing on Suns catalog…hmm. Guess trolls cant read.
“Its not that they are releasing the USIV+ today. Its that by the time they’re price comparably to AMD X2s, AMD X4s will be available at the same price.”
The USIV+ competes against POWER, Itanium, PA-RISC, etc. The USIV+ also includes features not present in AMD chips.
AMD competes against Intel’s chips and hits a lower priced market. Sun sells AMD, too.
It’s a matter of having different CPUs for different markets. The reason I would never buy an UltraSPARC IV+ isn’t that they are bad or anything, it’s just that I don’t have any need for a 16-way computer on my desk. That’s where Opteron steps in.
Bro, an Ultra 10 was ancient when Intel was putting out PIII’s. Comparing that POS Duron that you built to the Ultra 10 was like comparing a PIII to a Pentium. People would actually take your comments seriously when you get a clue.
Yeah, it was an Ultra 10 @ 440 Mhz with a USIIi and a Sun Blade 150 @ 550 Mhz with a USIIe. I installed a few Sun Blade 1000 class systems with USIIIs, but never messed around with them much. They were new when I got my Duron, but unfortunately priced out of the desktop range.
But my original point is still valid. Which Sun parts today compare with the price/performance ratio of an AMD X2 system for desktop/workstation class hardware?
You have so completely missed any relevant point that you are now in orbit around one of Jupiter’s moons.
1. The UltraSPARC IV+ looks really good. It is right up with the big boys (POWER, SPARC64) in performance. It is a plug-in upgrade for the current III and IV servers. The IV+ finally is where the original III should have been (relatively speaking).
2. Everyone who comments after having actually used a Niagara system loves them. I’ve read that even Google is testing them.
3. If by low-end server you mean the new X4100…it’s a Sun design…and it looks like it’ll kick some ass in the space/heat/power-sensitive markets (basically any computer server room). HPC people are probably drooling over 4 Opteron cores in 1U with remote management, 4 gigabit ports, etc.
Sun has some very attractive stuff coming down the line. In effect, they’re returning to their core business after a long detour. Today’s Sun Microsystems looks a lot like it did back in the late 80’s: they have a strong UNIX platform on workstation and server-class hardware that is affordable for small and medium businesses.
Only then they had BSD, now they have Solaris. Then they had VAX, now they have SPARC/Opteron. Then they were adopting standards from AT&T UNIX, now they look to Linux. Then they had the majority of the hacker community behind them, now they… ok, that’s where the analogy falls apart.
The tragic flaw that defined the proprietary UNIX market as the 1990’s began was the bickering over licensing that ended in IBM licensing MS-DOS instead of an i386 BSD port. Sun lost out on the PC revolution by underestimating the market for BSD on i386. Then throughout the 90’s Sun continued to underestimate the market for SunOS/Solaris on a rapidly growing PC market.
In the time that it took Sun to realize that x86 was making its way from the desktop to web servers to the datacenter, the hacker community it abandoned was poised to take Linux anywhere x86 would go and beyond (and the *BSDs had shook free from the shadows of their proprietary roots). In essence, the whole free software movement (from GNU to Linux to Mozilla) is a reaction to Sun’s failure to take UNIX where it needed to go. Never again will our contributions be abandoned in the name of business interests.
In the 1980’s Sun was an unbeatable powerhouse in the UNIX market. Today’s Sun boasts an equally impressive portfolio of technologies. The only thing their missing is the hacker community to whom they owe their very existence. The question that governs the future of Sun Microsystems is, can they win us back? Is it too late?
We are talking about two different markets, two entirely different product lines and radically different end-users with different needs. Apple has become more of a lifestye gadget company (everything has to look ultra-cool and hip), while Sun is providing the technology to power the backbones of networks (nobody cares much for the aesthetic design of servers, except for performance).
I am sorry, but I fail to see the connection and the need for the CEO of sun to cast himself into the die of Steve.
Very Sad.
I am sorry, but I fail to see the connection and the need for the CEO of sun to cast himself into the die of Steve.
He’s not talking to us. He’d rather we keep quiet (unless we agree with him). He’s talking to investors or, more properly, to that benighted group, “Investment Analysts,” who tell other people what stocks they should buy. In fairness, some investment analysts really analyze and try to come up with meaningful forecasts, but then there are those who are looking to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they can convince enough buyers that some investment will be a success, why then it will be, at least for awhile, as long as the stock price holds. It’s no coincidence that the article mentions “Sun has been on a five-year stock slide, having lost about 90 percent of its share price since January 2000. It has not had a year of positive net income since its fiscal year 2001.”
Secondarily, he may also be talking to corporate buyers and decision makers. These, as well as investment analysts,” are the kinds of people who are more likely to hear a marketing phrase such as “Having an iPod moment” and think that it actually means something.
I don’t know if buying STK was a good idea or not, but who among us would characterize yet another acquisition/consolidation as some kind of creative breakthrough or market-altering innovation? These are the kind of things I assume are to be inferred from the phrase having an iPod moment. The latest Sparc may or may not be a good thing, but how is it anything other than an incremental improvement over previous revisions? The same applies to all of the other proposed “iPod moments.” None of them represent any kind of major breakthrough. I’m inclined to think that Solaris 10 may be a good thing, but it’s just not earthshaking. There’s no danger that it will knock Linux off, nor Windows for that matter. It’s incremental, too.
I dont think it is all that distorted of a reality. Sun could certainly do for enterprise servers what Apple did for portable music devices. Their new line is truly innovative and probably the best server line up from any vendor. Solaris 10 is also gaining a lot of ground recently. I believe he is right to think that all that money spent on R&D while everyone else sat still during the bad years post dot-bomb will pay off.
Sorry your analogy falls apart when you compare the enterprise market vs, the consumer market.
Enterprise market is very slow moving, it takes a while for big changes to happen(look at how long it took for Java to enter, how long it took MSFT to gain a big foothold, etc.)
Consumer market could shove apple out the door by the end of the year, if something worthwhile showed up. It’s fickle. The fat that Apple has stayed at the top of it for so long is sheer brilliance on someone’s part(probably ives).
Of course Solaris 10 is gaining ground the older Solaris users have been upgrading. Let’s see how it is doing in a year? It might still be growing, but not as quickly as mcnealy dreams
Consumer market could shove apple out the door by the end of the year, if something worthwhile showed up. It’s fickle. The fat that Apple has stayed at the top of it for so long is sheer brilliance on someone’s part(probably ives).
I would hardly call a couple of years thanks to iPod success “so long”.
Is Sun going into the music business now? Isn’t that market a bit crowded?
I think the big revolution in the enterprise is moving away from expensive, name-brand hardware. That’s how Google became what they are. They used the cheapest things they could get their hands on and built off that rather than paying the huge markups that companies like Sun and IBM had.
It’s not that you aren’t getting something for those extra dollars. For example, with Solaris on a Sun box, you get guaranteed HW compatibility and things like hardware management/healing that you can’t get with the cheap crap. But it’s nothing revolutionary. Revolutionary is having an infrastructure built off of components that fail a lot and never having downtime ala Google. Servers that are cheaper in cost isn’t revolutionary. Good deal? Yes, but not revolutionary.
I recall seeing him speak at a Sun conference in the late 80s where he pissed and moaned about having done everything to start Sun “the right way” and not having as much success as Gates & Co. The thing about McNeally is that he is just a slightly above average overachiver type and not a genius. You know, speaking as a genius, the grass is always greener.. Where Scott went wrong is he didn’t hire enough genius non-engineers. Also, Scott is not Jewish and the Jews at MS and Apple have tended to organize themselves better –less political bullshit to establish the _initial_ pecking order and more respect for it once its established– meant more central control and easier execution. Of course, we won’t talk about the process whereby one traverses a predominately Jewish business hierarchy…heheh. Me thinks life at Sun is just a we bit more fun.
Are you saying the upper echelons of MSFT and Apple are Jewish and Sun isn’t?
No. But when the owner of Sun publicly asks why he has not been as successful as Microsoft and Apple, you have to compare the three men who founded these companies. The two college dropouts started their companies in their parents’ garage and out of Arizona motel rooms and had to draw upon the management philosophies they had learned in life up to that time. So if you want to answer the question posed by McNeally, you have to at least consider that MS and Apple replicated their central commander’s life philosophy and so did Sun. This leads to the comment that McNeally does not have the same philosophy. It is not really about Jewish vs. non-Jewish issues. It is about heterogenous management vs. homogeneous management in tech startups. The philosophy could just as easily have been Mormon, Hindu, Buddist or some particular style of MBA.
I think the admins ought to do something to mod this one down.
But until then:
Dear Anonymous, that was one of the sickest comments I’ve heard for while. Where did all that stuff about the Jews come from?
Is osnews becoming a home for anti-semites? :s
Calm down tiger. Anti-semites are sick depraved idiots.
no , its not becoming a site for antisemites.
he has a point, jews can organize better and make standards off bull.
I believe that sort of thinking must be a specific american trait. It’s not something you meet in Denmark.
They are no better nor worse than the rest of us. Your line of thinking leads easily to other claims, which can only be described as one thing.
dylansmrjones
kristian AT herkild DOT dk
Umm… Yeah… Where is SolTunes, the SunPod, the PowerSPARC G5, the iSPARC G5, the Solaris X.4 with the dock and a Sun menu across the top with SWidgits and SolDash, AOL for Solaris X, SolChat A/V, SolDVD, Toast for Solaris, Office For Solaris? Solfari, SolPhoto, SolCal, and SolTime 7 with H.264? Yes Sun with all of these excellent products under their belt should just go right ahead and compare themselve to Apple. Maybe if they actually developed for the consumer market, they would actually have some logical reason as to why they compared themselves to Apple. For now it really wasn’t the smartest thing to compare themselves to. They only thing they should have compared themselves to with Apple was XServ and possibly OS X server, that’s about it.
Instead of looking at the types of products involved, look instead at the development of a product that was so trendy that it enabled one company to quickly dominate a market and obtain all the financial success that follows as a result. You can still easily raise criticisms about this sentiment since it suggests unrealistic behavior for Sun’s target market, but you don’t get wrapped on in worrying that there’s no SunPod.
Ok, for the anon who posted earlier about all the AWESOME thinks apple did…you’re wrong. They stole the vast majority of it from PARC labs.
They stole…the visual interface
They stole…Appletalk
They stole…laser printers
They stole…Ethernet
Need I go on? Just read “Riders of Lightning” sometime. Steve Jobs and Apple got a tour of PARC labs and suddenly within a year almost all of PARC’s modern inventions showed up in OS x (where x is whatever version ya wanted). Granted, Xerox basically blew PARC’s entire conceptulaization off but…such is life.
Apple really isn’t innovative…VERY few of their current “features” and “innovations” are their own. The iPod wasn’t developed in house. OSX wasn’t developed in house (but rather the bastardization of MULTIPLE products) and yea…need I go on?
Sun IS innovative. They’ve been one of the prime server processor design centers in the world. Their OS, while klunky and a bitch to use at times, is still a pretty damn good idea. But Sun started crashing in the dot.com times, as well as the bust. They let alot of people go, threw away their advantages but really…they’re a far more innovative company than Apple could ever dream of. Because their products could actually change an entire industry. Apple? Well, they can just say they have a really pretty product.
Btw, I own an iBook, an iPod, a Linux machine, and a still going strong even though its incredible old Sun 20 workstation.
Sun will turn around, and in fact they have been. I will bet money that Sun will soon become one of the premier enterprise/workstation companies. INCLUDING software and support.
– Chris
email: [email protected] (send flames or responses here)
website: http://www.tealart.com
You sir, seem to be confusing “Innovation” with “Invention,” and in so doing, damned near everything you said is invalid.
I don’t know why the word “jew” is being used in this thread, unless it means Java Environment Works ! So many ancronymns, so little time. I prefer Fedora, myself.
Now we have a mixture of irrelevant ethnic slurs and fantatical diatribes for and against yet another supplier. Once again we descend into the ‘Apple is innovative’ ‘Oh no it isn’t’ quagmire. Could one suggest that you go temporarily to moderated postings to screen out this stuff?
Here is an effort to draw a serious comparison between the two companies.
They have both followed the same strategy in two different market segments, arguably with similar results. This was to supply bundled hardware/OS. In both cases, enforced by the use of relatively low volume, small market share, processors.
As their customers bought more and more computers, increasingly they have bought open source hardware. This has resulted in both companies taking a smaller and smaller share of the IT budget, whether consumer or corporate.
Apple has to some extent solved the company problem this left them with, by staying in the niche of bundled equipment for the PC product line, and diversifying into consumer goods as a source of growth. Sun was in a bigger market to start with, and it has held up and grown better, the niche was more clearly defined, and the progress to open source hardware has been much slower.
However, it is the same underlying strategic problem: if you are supplying one particular solution to a customer base most of whose purchases are for other solutions, you do end up marginalised. And you really do have two and only two choices, if you want growth, to stay in the niche with your computer product line and diversify out of it for growth, or to start supplying the kind of solutions the market is buying – open hardware.
Apple seems to have found a viable solution for the company, though we can argue whether its viable long term for the product line. It is hard to see that Sun has really confronted its own version of it, and its still harder to see what they can plausibly diversify into.
However, moving into open hardware is very difficult and very risky. The temptation to just carry on with a strategy that you started with and that does work, though maybe doesn’t deliver the growth of your great days, must be enormous.
Its a fundamental question about the OS market: what is the future of the bundled OS+proprietary hardware segment? And if you are stuck in it for historical reasons, what do you do?
… but not for that, it’s just that he lost a lot of share holder value.
Sun needs to fiew ALL of it’s sales and middle manamgnet; sell X86/Linux(and get rid of Sparc and SlowLaris) servers direct ONLY shiped from Asia and charge for javac .. how hard is that?
.V
… but not for that, it’s just that he lost a lot of share holder value.
Sun needs to fiew ALL of it’s sales and middle manamgnet; sell X86/Linux(and get rid of Sparc and SlowLaris) servers direct ONLY shiped from Asia and charge for javac .. how hard is that?
.V
Ah, the good old FUD attack (Vic’s speciality).
Yeah get rid of Sparc and sell X86 like SGI! Yeah that’s a great strategy!
Oh, it’s just too sad.
http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&cmdViewP…
Look at that. You can still buy those ancient systems, brand new, direct from Sun. And check out those prices:
Sun Blade 150 @ 550 Mhz = $1395
@ 650 Mhz = $1995
w/ an XVR-600 = $3395
Do you have any clue the type of PC one can build for $3395?
Maybe if Sun didn’t sell their Ultra 10 systems, like their Sun Blade 150s, like they were new until 2003 I wouldn’t have compared them with a Duron.
Are Sun Blade 150s new systems? Why does Sun want you to pay new prices for old slow hardware? Why do they even have Pentium 3 class systems for sale at premium prices?
Some even consider the USIIi to be a Pentium class system. That’s pretty old tech to be leading the industry with.
Are Sun Blade 150s new systems? Why does Sun want you to pay new prices for old slow hardware? Why do they even have Pentium 3 class systems for sale at premium prices?
Duh… because customers buy them!!!
If it wasn’t for the dot-com explosion, I doubt McNealy would have ever made a profit. McNealy took a great inovative leader, and at best, did nothing with it.
Jobs has made some big mistakes. But, Jobs also has some huge successes. Jobs has done stuff that, I very much doubt, anybody else could have done.
Does anybody really believe that a complete incompetant like McNealy could build a company from nothing to a massive success with the first practical home computer?
Could McNealy have revolutionized the computer world with the first practical GUI?
Could McNealy have revolutionized the way that music is sold and listened to?
I’m not saying that apple was the first with the technology. But apple sure knew how to market what nobody else could. Can McNealy say the same?
Jobs is far from perfect, but McNealy wouldn’t make a pimple on Jobs’ butt.
As some pc centric posters here ever recognize,
Suns core business and until the dot bom bubble main source of income was the unix workstation market. They basically invented them single handedly, Andy Berchtholtsheim basically invented a computer which was 5-7 years ahead of anything you could get for the desktop at the time. The concept was easy, get the best processor you could get at the time, get the best operating system you could get at the time and deliver a machine for scientits and knowledge workers which was affordable by them within the boundaries of their jobs.
Basically the entire 80s- mid 90s workstation business evolved around the concepts laied out by Sun, and Companies like HP, IBM, SGI and others as well as Sun owned a fortune on that one.
Suns influence in the Unix world did not end there, the whole NFS concpet basically was delivered by Sun, Sun basically did the groundworks on display postscript with a predecessor which never took off.
Also OSX is partially by Sun, because the whole NextStep concept was a joint effort by NeXT and Sun and now resides as OpenStep in the wild.
The influence of Sun with Java is undenyable.
Sun is one hell of an innovative company, but yet it is constantly bashed by pc centric people which never could see how much Sun has done for the evolvement of computers. Sun is not previvalent on the desktop anymore, the workstation business like anything has faded over time, but they shifted early enough to servers and made a fortune in the dot bomb bubble, and they are still there. Look at IBM they slowly shift away from hardware to consulting (which will be a shot in the foot in the long run), HP basically slowly is becoming a brand, apple is still strong, but they shift more and more towards consumer electronics.
Dell is a joke technologywise, they are just vendors, getting the stuff cheap trying to get as much profit as possible.
Sun still designs from the core, maybe there mistake because you cannot get the maximum revenues in the short term, but they are still there, so they must be doing something right.
McNealy missed an opportunity with Linux. With a cash hoard of $7B after the dot com boom McNealy could have bought a major stake in RedHat with less the $500M and become a major player in the Lintel market but chose a different path. Today Sun is a sorry shadow of it’s former self and McNealy is too thickheaded to admit it.
Rather than Windows losing market share to Linux, it is Solaris that is being cannibalized because Solaris skills are easily interchangeable with Linux skills. Sun needs a new direction without McNealy and perhaps needs to be bought out by HP or Apple or even EMC. My prediction is that 5 years down the road there will be no Sun as an independent company if the continue down this present path.