Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 14th Nov 2008 21:38 UTC, submitted by pantheraleo
The world hasn't been kind to Sun for quite a while now, but with the economic downturn, things are getting worse. Sun announced today that it will be laying off 18% of its workforce, or about 6000 people. In addition, it was announced that Sun's software chief Rich Green has resigned for reasons that were not stated, although as part of Sun's reorganization and cost cutting efforts, many departments are being merged, and the software division is being restructured and reorganized.
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Member since:2005-09-27
Member since:2006-08-09
Industrial production has to somehow correspond to demand. On the other hand, financial bubbles, i.e., price/debt inflation, i.e., bank revenues, can grow virtually without limits, extracting value from the productive economy - until the bubble bursts. If your business then depends largely on having banks as customers, you're dead.
Although I would agree that the American domestic market is unique since the US doesn't have to finance its own trade deficit/budget deficit.
Member since:2005-07-06
Because we all know than in the enterprise world only banks dissapear and only banks get be bougth by other companies.
Who would have considered saying that at one time? It was always going to be risky staying with one set of customers regardless.
Sun are relying on big businesses, many of them financial, buying into large, high-end systems with an enterprise price tag to match. This is Sun's market, it's their culture, it's the way they have always been and they don't want to diversify to anything else. Sun, collectively and individually, simply do not comprehend anything else. Unfortunately, they're always at risk when companies ask themselves questions like "Do we need to spend money on this?" and "Why are we buying that expensive stuff when we have something cheaper elsewhere that performs a more than adequate job here?"
Sun has had many years and the cash to diversify and mitigate this risk, but they either don't understand this at all, or as I think, they went into a spiral of denial and believed that they could tweak their existing stuff here and there, hype some technical stuff few care about, continue selling big machines at big prices to markets that had moved on and everything would be OK. It was never going to be.
What's missing from this headline is that Sun have made a $1.68 billion dollar loss this quarter alone - hence the job losses.
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Member since:
2006-08-09
That's the sucky part of selling a lot of your stuff to banks. You can make a lot of money but in the end banks are just parasites, if the host dies, they're dead too. Bigger bank fish will eat the smaller bank fish.
Next, Red Hat, Novell?