“Technical muscle and a history of innovation made Sun a Silicon Valley standard-bearer. It also blinded famously combative Scott McNealy to the coming Linux wars. Now he’s fighting to survive.” Read the article at Wired.Elsewhere, Sun Microsystems’ computing gear will be at the heart of a transformation under which HBO and 14 other networks will retire their tape-based broadcasting equipment. SilliconValley is wondering about Java: Popular, but how profitable? eWEEK says that Sun is wasting no time prepping to take advantage of any potential customer fallout from the looming battle between the SCO Group and IBM over Big Blue’s license for AIX, its Unix operating system.
Here one day,
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3751
and gone the next
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3784
Its amazing how fast things change in the IT world!
(insert Titanic slogan “KING OF THE WORLD”, just before she sinks!)
Age may be one explanation for his woes, but there are others: his company’s stock price, slumping sales, and customer defections, not to mention threats posed by a burgeoning list of competitors.
His company’s stock price? It’s been going up for weeks:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SUNW&d=c&k=c1&a=v&p=s&t=3m&l=on&z=m&q=…
Slumping sales? Don’t think so:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3751
This article seems to just take pot shots at McNealy and paint a very gloomy picture:
After nearly 20 years as Sun’s CEO, Scott McNealy seems genuinely baffled by the notion that his company is doomed.
Yes, a doomed company that’s turning a profit:
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2003/04/14/daily45.h…
Honestly, I don’t get where people get off writing these stories. We hear them about Apple all of the time, how “Apple is doomed unless…” Well, Apple certainly isn’t doomed, and neither is Sun…
Sun is certainly a confused company. They are desperately in need of direction. But in the meantime, they continue to do what they do best, manufacturing and supporting some of the finest high-end systems available.
I’ve already replaced my companies linux servers with sun systems.
I don’t want to be running some RIP-OFF OS, like linux. It’s just not worth the hassle.
Bill
Sun isn’t going anywhere fast. They have their niche and are turning a profit at the moment – that doesn’t spell doom any more than it does for Apple.
Also about the ad in the article, I have an Apple… will PC booster work for me? Afterall, it said my performance was really bad and that it could make my computer (500mhz PPC) run like a 3ghz P4….
The main point of the article is that Sun has not been able to build a consistent strategy over the years to deal with Linux, and I agree with the author on that point. However that doesn´t spell doom for Sun, obviously.
@Bascule
Yes, a doomed company that’s turning a profit…
Actually a profit of $4 million on revenues of $2.8 billion is not really considered a profit. They just broke even. They did generate positive cash flow which is a good thing, though. Sun is in good shape financially.
As the article mentions, Sun has to reinvent itself at this point, while keeping its ¨heavy iron¨ clients happy. And they´ll downsize further, which isn´t that good for company morale.
Also they seem to be going through a leadership crisis.
I think this article atleast 6 weeks late. It seems things are looking up for Sun.
There is NO growth in in the computer and IT market whatsoever. If Sun is making 2.5 billion a quarter, too bad for their stock holders. As long as they are making a profit or breaking even, that’s fine by me.
US stock holder need to get a clue. The market’s just bad for tech and will not get better in the coming year.
Vic
I think if they were smart they would have a migration from Unixware campaign, although I think a certain about of this has happened “naturaly”. Migrating from AIX means such a hardware investment that nobody is going to do it.
“I’ve already replaced my companies linux servers with sun systems.”
Yeah, right.”
Let’s just face the reality here… Sun is doing good.
I think this only shows how strong the Linux hype is in the media….It’s david vs Goliat and everyone seems to be feeling pity for David (Linux)…
Soon the hype will be gone and Linux will be forgotten and the real giants can play, BSD/Win/Solaris/Novell/OBOS
@XBe
@Bill Smith
I was talking to some Dell executives the other day: 95% of their cluster sales are with Linux, 5% with Windows.
And clusters are the fastest growing segment in the market right now for Dell.
When I began using Linux in 1994 it was just a hobby OS. Nowadays it competes (and surpasses in many cases) with the best commercial OSs.
Yes, we poke fun at it, call it Slowlaris and such, but in truth, how many other OS’s scale to the hights of Solaris? Wouldn’t YOU like a 106 processor server, running under ONE Solaris kernel image?
Sun’s problem is the perceived “MHz” difference between the Ultra Sparc IIIi and Intel’s chips. Also, Sun does tend to over price their hardware, but they also provide top-of-the-line hardware with plenty of redundancy.
As much as I love Linux and the BSD’s, it will truly be a shame if/when Sun goes under.
Look, it’s not just hype. While yes, there is a lot of it, Linux has already achieved enough critical mass that it will be a major player in the IT market for a while. Are you still wishing that BSD will, against all odds, gain dominance? Not gonna happen, even if it is technically superior. Two companies have tried commercializing BSD and making money, and both failed. Don’t compare Novell to Linux, they are two different types of systems (not to mention that Novell’s buisness strategy is now Linux-based). And OBOS? Are you kidding? HAHAHAH! I’m their biggest fan, but BeOS is *not* a server OS (Netcraft calls it “unknown”).
As for Sun, while I do wish that they would take a more SGI-ish Linux embracement path, they have done a whole lot for Linux (the Java VM, OpenOffice, etc). They are going to be here for a while, as commercial Unices will always have their place and Solaris is foremost among them.
“Two companies have tried commercializing BSD and making money, and both failed.”
Not counting SUN (SunOS), and Apple (MacOS X)?
Though going by the endless stream of SUN and Apple are doomed articles ad nauseum over the years, I suppose they could be what you are referring to. These articles are tiresome and irrelevant.
I was talking to a SUN Australia employee and it is interesting how the situation is unfolding.
SUN will always be around as there will always be demand for high end, ultra-high-availability servers and Linux won’t go alway, it is like what NT did to UNIX, it simply pushed UNIX into the high end and NT takes the low end, however, since NT hasn’t picked up its act, Linux is going to REPLACE NT and UNIX will pretty much stay where it is and in some cases creep into the mainframe space.
>>I was talking to some Dell executives the other day: 95% >>of their cluster sales are with Linux, 5% with Windows
Just hangin’ out chatting w/ M. Dell?
The interesting # would be of all the revenue, how much is Windows vs. Linux. That would be an interesting statistic and would tell overall what people are buy (vs. the hype). Dell would be a good cross-sample of Corporate buyers at present.
Look, SunOS has been dead for years and years. Notice how Solaris is based on SVR4? And OSX cannot be considered BSD. Yes, it uses a mixture of BSD kernels and some other stuff, but Apple is clearly a special case (what, you think OSX will replace Linux on servers? The reason OSX is popular is that it gets the maybe 5% Mac user group and a couple of geeks who go for the Unixy trappings.) I mean BSDI and Wind River (was that it? Might have been Walnut Creek–some river word; can’t tell the damn things apart)
It’s called that for a reason – it *is* slow. The nice thing about Solaris, however, is that as it gets loaded it doesn’t get much *slower*.
Solaris is built for distance, not for speed.
I hope everything under the sun will be running under Sun
Well, exaggerated, of course, but let’s hope there still be day after night, and Sun will be shining. They deserve it.
Linux is a highly political movement, reinventing the wheel, wasting resources, not moving forward. No imagination, folks. Just copycatting. Reminds me of Bolshevik’s revolution — bla-bla-bla (called “ideas”) for non- or semi-educated masses took off, crowd saw “light” in the end of the tunnel. We all know where it went and how ended. Everybody has a huge ego. We do not want to spend money for a job well done. Expropriate. Manipulation is blooming. Do not let others make money, because we do not make money either.
“It’s called that for a reason – it *is* slow.”
It’s only slow on single processor Intel hardware. Why? Because Solaris is optimized for SMP. So it takes a performance hit on single CPU systems.
Solaris shines on SMP systems. And it runs circles around Linux when it comes to scalability.
I really like Sun and hope the best for them. I do think McNealy has spent too much time lambasting other companies and making enemies. Even Steve Jobs stopped doing that 🙂
The computer world is full of ‘visionaries’; Jobs, McNealy, Ellison and even Gates. These individuals have built their corporations at phenomenal speed. The problem is that computing is now a mature industry with modest growth and generally small profits. The entrpreneur can create wealth quickly and destroy it even faster.
Many seem to think that a ‘profit’ is when you earn more than you spend. Technically it is but in reality it isn’t. If an organisation isn’t making about 5% after-tax return on assets it is actually losing money – that is most of the industry. Furthermore the widespread use of stock options is an accounting trick to make corporations appear profitable because salaries are simply deferred instead of immediately reducing profits.
It is probable that many of the biggest software and hardware players are actually bankrupt although appearing profitable – think Enron. A couple more years of continued downturn will probably see many of the major players out of business.