“Perhaps the changing of the guard at Sun Microsystems was no shock to some. Now pundits can dish over whether or not it will be the start of a new era at Sun – and one that might mean more collaboration with Microsoft.”
“Perhaps the changing of the guard at Sun Microsystems was no shock to some. Now pundits can dish over whether or not it will be the start of a new era at Sun – and one that might mean more collaboration with Microsoft.”
it’s all for the press. its all for wallstreet. I will be surprised if they jointly develope something meaningful. Now I can see them using each other’s code in certain places and talking about partnerships with the press but that’s all I see.
Schwartz was trying to make the impression that profitability won’t come with just job cuts.
I believe Sun will be expanding their x86 line, but also eventually offering Windows on them as a way to increase volume.
I believe Sun will be expanding their x86 line, but also eventually offering Windows on them as a way to increase volume.
I will quote Sir John Harvey Jones, certainly one of if not the greatest businessmen and industrialists ever:
“Being yet another producer of components for the same product as everyone else is simply not enough. If you are playing that game you are straight into the necessity for greater and greater volume, together with ever decreasing price – and sooner or later this will lead to bankruptcy.”
The thing that also amuses me greatly about this so called analyst is that he thinks that pre-installing Windows on Sun boxes will stem the flow of defections from Solaris to Linux. Right…
“Being yet another producer of components for the same product as everyone else is simply not enough”
I understand this, but unfortunately enough for Sun they are in a Lose/Lose situation. It is bank on Solaris/SPARC and continually report a loss as companies selling high volume x86 solutions erode your sales, or offer your own Solaris, Linux, Windows/x86 solution to prevent your customers from defecting to your competitor for those solutions instead.
Windows currently holds the number 1 place in server sales (source: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12760 ) and it is not even offered by Sun.
The market is shifting to lower cost x86 solutions and this shift will take place with or without Sun.
Someone also said: “If you can’t beat em, join em.”
Edited 2006-04-26 23:19
It is bank on Solaris/SPARC and continually report a loss as companies selling high volume x86 solutions erode your sales
x86 sales haven’t dented IBM’s sales and income of Power. I think high end SPARC will still work, but Sun have been very cagy about x86 where it has threatened a place where SPARC used to dominate. What Sun need to do is take Solaris, or even Linux, and create a more unique experience that is over and above what other Linux distributors and Microsoft are doing. They are in a fairly unique position whereby they can supply hardware and software, and provided you have something tangible, people will go for that.
They need to improve Solaris, or use Linux, in a way that others aren’t. They’re always talking about Java as this wonderful unified solution, so maybe it’s time they actually started damn well doing it. Create solid graphical front-ends for Solaris or Linux using Java, create a desktop integrated properly with Java that will allow ISVs to write software, create rich graphical administration tools for Solaris or Linux. Basically, do what others are not doing.
At the moment, Sun and other companies like Novell are devoid of ideas. They just aren’t moving things forward, and even Red Hat can’t do what I’ve described because their developers are at full stretch aleady and are using the wrong technology.
sun is offering ms windows on sun x86 machines for quite a long time. and they offer paid support for it too.
“sun is offering ms windows on sun x86 machines for quite a long time. and they offer paid support for it too.”
This is not really true. They offer Windows on Workstations, but not on servers.
For their Sun Fire (AMD) servers you may select Solaris, SUSE, or RHEL.
Source: http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&cmdStart…
Their x86 servers are certified to work with Windows but this is not the same thing as offering (or supporting) it.
Edited 2006-04-26 23:23
as for support [servers & workstations]:
http://www.sun.com/service/serviceplans/windows/
as for windows for the workstations, you have to ask for it [normally solaris comes preinstalled]:
http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation_comparison.html
The only way out for Sun is to emulate Apple, just make Solaris the best OS there is for Servers and stop paying attenttion to Linux – there’s NO need for yet another Linux vendor. Apple doesn’t pay any attention to linux – they ddidn’t announce Linux support in Bootcamp, they didn’t announce support for Linux with any of their apps like iTMS or iPod support, so seems like ignoring Linux is the way to go and not get swallowed up by the opensourcers. I pity Novell, MySQL, JBoss and all Microsoft wanna be’s
I don’t think Sun needs to “emulate Apple” in this sense. Sun is already quite obviously anti-Linux. They flirted with it (Linux) shortly at one point in time, but very quickly they went back to the old Solaris or nothing stance. I’m glad.
Go read the OSOL mailing lists, you’ll see quite plainly various things from Linux getting shot down (very, very few things survive even as ideas).
In other words, one thing you need not worry about is Sun paying much (if any) attention to Linux.
They’ll let you order systems with Linux installed, but that’s about it. You can’t blame them for that, there is (some) demand apparently, and their sales go up by allowing it. (Some people won’t buy a server unless it’s got the latest buzzword OS installed on it..)
[Edit: To make sure I’m clear, keep in mind I am saying Linux, as in the kernel – NOT the distributions. A lot of ideas from the Linux distributions get kicked around and acknowledged as good.]
Edited 2006-04-26 22:45
I don’t think Sun needs to “emulate Apple” in this sense. Sun is already quite obviously anti-Linux. They flirted with it (Linux) shortly at one point in time, but very quickly they went back to the old Solaris or nothing stance. I’m glad.
Its not about being anti-Linux, its simply getting on, and just don’t even acknowledge the existance of Linux; when Solaris gets compared; compare it to Windows and other UNIX’s; when comparing their middleware software offerings, compare them to other commercial vendors.
Its the old story, “I’ll let the other joker do what ever he wants, because quite frankly, we’re more concerned about delivering solutions to our customers that meet their needs in the real world” – that is what should be the underlying mantra; not comparisons with accomodations with Linux.
What Solaris need to do; stop providing Linux ’emulation’ and start getting out there, and PAYING software companies to port NATIVE applications to Solaris – bugger emulation, go for native!
Approach a company, sign them up, hand over the cash, and get the software producing ball rolling; once people see Solaris 10, see the servers and workstations available AND the share volume of software available for the Solaris x86 platform, it would be a hard thing to resist given its competitive pricing.
What do you mean by this Kawai
“What Solaris need to do; stop providing Linux ’emulation’ and start getting out there, and PAYING software companies to port NATIVE applications to Solaris – bugger emulation, go for native!”
You know as well as I that Solaris BrandZ/lx is not emulation but an implementation much like wine is an implementation of the win32 API.
You know as well as I that Solaris BrandZ/lx is not emulation but an implementation much like wine is an implementation of the win32 API.
BrandZ is the use of a linux distribution sitting inside a container; you’ll simply have the OS/2 effect – people refusing to port natively to Solaris because ‘brandz does the job ok’ – thats not the kind of message you want to send to ISV’s – ‘its ok to be lazy, because SUN will accomodate for your laziness!”
SUN need to, like I said, take their $3bilion and approach the Adobes, Corel’s, Peach Tree’s, Quickens, MYOB’s of the software industry and ask, “hey, we want your applications, native on our platform, what will it take to get you onboard? free hardware? $100million in cash? Johnnathon doing a table dance?!”.
Right now, SUN is doing nothing in this area – great hardware, great operating system (when running on their hardware!), but shithouse software – the world doesn’t run on OSS; the world runs on software produced by the big names, get the big names on board, and the customers will follow, until then, Solaris will be second fiddle to Linux, which is playing second fiddle to MacOS X and Windows.
Edited 2006-04-27 09:10
“What Solaris need to do; stop providing Linux ’emulation’ and start getting out there, and PAYING software companies to port NATIVE applications to Solaris – bugger emulation, go for native!
Approach a company, sign them up, hand over the cash, and get the software producing ball rolling; once people see Solaris 10, see the servers and workstations available AND the share volume of software available for the Solaris x86 platform, it would be a hard thing to resist given its competitive pricing.”
Ya know, this is EXACTLY what Sun needs to do. The software prices is good. The equipment pricing is good. Their support pricing is good too. They are the cheapest guys in town. I just wished that their low end server could take more than 2 hard drives.
Sun is actually in a very good position right now. It is just a matter of time for people to digest and understand that currently Sun has got the best technology on the market. Sun has got absolutely the best server operating system on the market bar none and is doing just the right thing with processors. SPARC is bound to rebound — hell Niagara is already the most powerful processor out there per socket on throuput workloads (one Niagara processor deliver about the same performance as two dual-core Power5 processors on pure throughput oriented loads like web serving). Sun is ahead of the curve with Niagara and it already doing something that every processor manufacturer will be doing in 5 to 10 years. Sun does not have any problems with technology, it just matter of resolving the perception issues lingering from the dark days.
I agree. THeir software stack besides the Solaris environment is impressive as well. With Java 6, Jee5 including EJB 3.0, Netbeans IDE stack, etc is very very lucrative to a lot of IT professionals. They have great ideas. Lets hope this new CEO will lead Sun to where it belongs!
“Sun has got absolutely the best server operating system on the market bar none”
Wether Solaris is “the best” depends entirely on what you need to do.
To paraphrase another reply in another thread: “Does Sun pay you?”
> Right now, SUN is doing nothing in this area – great hardware, great operating system (when running on their hardware!), but shithouse software
Errm, actually Solaris Sparc has more commercial applications than any other Unix OS (Linux included). Things are ramping up quickly on the x86 end of things as well. With just a few exceptions there are hardly any big name application that are not avaialable for Solaris x86. Considering that porting applications from Linux to Solaris is generally a matter of a simple recompile, the lead that Linux might have at the moment should disappears quick rapidly. The upcoming update in Solaris will bring ZFS to production and that will be a *huge* differentiator compared with Linux, so there should be a lot of deffections from Linux camp. Plus it seems people are slowly getting the message that Solaris is actually a lot cheaper than Linux and overall Solaris is a much better bang for the buck.
> At the moment, Sun and other companies like Novell are devoid of ideas. They just aren’t moving things forward, and even Red Hat can’t do what I’ve described because their developers are at full stretch aleady and are using the wrong technology.
Hah? Sun is pretty much the only tier 1 company that is truly doing any innovation nowadays. Novell and RedHat do not invent anything, they are merely packaging companies just putting different faces on essentially the same thing.