Sun’s Java Desktop has been something of a surprise hit, both for Sun and the Linux desktop arena. With major deals such as 200 million seats sold into China already brokered, it is already proving itself a successful alternative to Windows. With a recent refresh, in the form of JDS2, and much enthusiasm for the three-dimensional Looking Glass desktop, it seemed a good time to get to the bottom of Sun’s desktop strategy. PCPro managed to grab a few minutes with Peder Ulander, Senior Director, Marketing Desktop Solutions, Sun Microsystems.
Through the Looking Glass – a perspective on Sun’s Desktop Strategy
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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200 million seats for china? What’s the deal here? I had a friend who just got back from China and said everybody is using pirated MS Windows and he never saw Linux anywhere. No offense, but could it be corporate smoke and mirrors?
My guess its corporations using it, not personal people. Corporations are well lets say less prone pirating software and other various things at least in the US due to threat of lawsuit of distruction of data on their computers.
People on the other hand, well it wouldnt suprise me if the same amount of pirated windows here is the same as over there since just about everyone seems to have a copy of that corp windows xp version in the draw of their desks (note: yes I was exgerrating, some people are law abiding citizens, but to quote someone I talked to at my school, “why pay for it when you can get it free”, and so the piracy continues)
Sun’s Java Desktop has been something of a surprise hit, both for Sun and the Linux desktop arena.
The licensing is wretched. My CIO won’t touch it.
With major deals such as 200 million seats sold into China already brokered, it is already proving itself a successful alternative to Windows.
No. It takes a long time to roll out 200 million seats. The vast majority of these seats been deployed, let alone deployed successfully. (It’s eminently possibly that the Chinese are just trying to strongarm MS, and never will deploy them). Moreover, neither Sun nor China are talking about how much money changed hands, so there is no indication that it was a financial success either.
Later on he talks about 250 corporate pilot tests. Those aren’t actual deployments. A little later he talks about German and Italian banks, which I can buy.
Not saying no one’s using JDS, but the article hypes it more than is merited.
As I understand it the deal was for government and educational desktops. Of course Joe six-pack of Tsingtao will still be using pirated Win XP.
My guess its corporations using it, not personal people. Corporations are well lets say less prone pirating software and other various things at least in the US due to threat of lawsuit of distruction of data on their computers.
Chinese courts are notoriously unfriendly to US companies who sue Chinese nationals. Thus far anti-piracy campaigns have had enormous difficulty gaining ground there.
I would have to agree that the 200 million figure is very very high. There are only about 600 million people in China between the ages of 20 and 50, considering the workstation nature of Looking Glass I find it hard to believe someone bought Licenses for 1/3 of them.
Sun probably sold some “unlimited” corporate licenses where unlimited = < 50 million or something. That is the only way I can think of that these statistics are possible.
200 million??? Isnt there only like 4500 million ppl on this earth, most of which never will see a computer…
I would guess 200 million is like the number of legal MS OS users in the world? And probably like another 400million illegal ones? Unless the numbers i just guesstimated here are wrong thats ONE HELL OF A START for this OS…
isn’t this the same distro that people are having real difficulties installing on standard pcs?
what do these 200 million do with it, use it for a drink coaster ?! ;p
Well yes, there is a lot of eye candy. It’s exciting, it demonstrates innovation.
Wasn’t it Bill Gates that started all this talk about innovation? Whoever it was, it doesn’t mean everyone else has to follow suit. I think we’re all a little tired of hearing about the latest “innovations”. Stop talking about it, just do it. And call it something else. All Sun does is annoy with their stupid market speak.
Unless the numbers i just guesstimated here are wrong thats ONE HELL OF A START for this OS…
Oh, it’s just the sound of O being sucked into a hype machine.
200 million? If Sun is going to hype why don’t they go for the whole enchilada and say they’ve licensed JDS for all 1.4 billion? people in China. geez.
The licensing is wretched. My CIO won’t touch it.
Can you be more specific as to why the licensing is wretched?
Is your company trying to redistribute it?
“200 million? If Sun is going to hype why don’t they go for the whole enchilada and say they’ve licensed JDS for all 1.4 billion? people in China. geez.”
Uh, some people have multiple computers. How about 2 billion licenses?
I wonder if I’m the only one who feels that either Ulander doesn’t really know what he is talking about or Sun has a distorted view of the desktop. Almost the entire interview is full of inconsistencies (gosh ! it took me an hour to compile them):
1) “In the menu, programs name are replaced by words that people can understand (diagram editor, image editor, postscript viewer, etc.).”
After a training session, why can’t people understand that GIMP is an image editor ?
2) “This second release is all about ‘how do we make it easy for admins now?”
JDS is based on outdated software, according to some reviews. Using an up to date version of Suse would be a first step to make things easy for sysadmins.
3) “So what we’ve done is to create a patch and content and application updating service for the desktop within an enterprise.”
Haven’t Suse or RedHat already produced that kind of tool ?
4) “For example, you can say, everybody in customer service, you can only go through this proxy and you can’t reset it so no longer is it public access to the Web.”
Once again, isn’t this feature already available in other linux distributions ?
5) “And the last management piece is the remote desktop takeover. It uses VNC to say, OK I’m going to make a Helpdesk call, I can’t find this application”.
Is the use of VNC really something new in a corporate environment ?
6) “One of the big things that has hampered thin clients and workstations success for a while has been they’ve used this archaic CDE that can handle the desktop type of technology”.
Whose fault is it if Sun stuck to CDE for so many years ? Also, JDS minimum requirement in terms of hard disk space is 3 GB for the root directory. How thin is that ?
7) “Our biggest markets to date from an enterprise perspective? Europe, and from the public sector perspective, Asia.”
Packard Bell is a company that caters mainly to those geographical areas. That hasn’t boosted their revenue very much.
8) “I think the big thing for us, when we go out and position this is that it’s not about replacing the Windows desktops.”
According to Sun website, the JDS is architected to make it easy for users to transition from a Windows environment, contrary to what Ulander said.
9) “When a customer suffers some business interruption due to a Windows virus, you can’t just go in and tell them to use Java Desktop instead. The reasoning is that if your linux installation suffers the same fate, you’re out of luck.”
Can Ulander tell us when was the last time a linux virus caused major disruptions for corporations ?
10) “From an enterprise perspective, our largest deployments are in Europe.”
Sun is a US corporation but it can’t even find one place in the USA where they can test their project. The case Ulander mentions has nothing to do with JDS deployment. Isn’t it pathetic ?
11) “Dell did a Linux desktop four or five years ago and it crashed and burned, it was horrible. They still have a bitter taste left over what they tried to do with Linux.”
Dell’s commitment to Linux was only hypocrisy and was hampered by the fear of Microsoft reaction. This is a well known fact. Check Google for horror stories.
12) “If the Linux guys want to buy this that’s great, but let’s face it, they love Debian, that’s the desktop of choice for these guys.”
This statement about Debian being the favourite desktop choice for Linux users is quite stupid. What about Mandrake, Xandros, Suse, Lindows, etc. ?
13) “Drive those interoperability issues – I think we have a unique position on that with our relationship with Microsoft and the best interoperability story out there.”
I guess the Samba team members spend their time reading poems 🙂
14) “who’s going to do the managed desktop services, who’s going to run my helpdesk?”
Isn’t this why linux vendors already offer support options ?
15) “pooling in the Linux developers”
IBM, SGI, HP, RedHat, Gentoo and others started doing that long before Sun looked at linux without a gas mask.
16) “And the desktop is an interesting spot, because there really hasn’t been any innovation since ’84. There really hasn’t.”
Apple, Microsoft, BeOS, KDE, GNOME, etc. have spent years doing what ?
17) “And I think the nice part for Sun is it’s broadening our markets and winning new customers for Sun. That’s the most important thing.”
The most important thing is that while Sun was looking with contempt at gamers, hackers and tinkerers, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Nvidia, Creative Labs and other companies catered to countless Joe Bloes and made billions of dollars with that kind of clientele.
I was too tired to write my first name before posting my comments. That’s also why at item number 6, I talked about a root directory, instead of a partition.
Hi,
Hmmmm, while I’m not a supporter of Sun, and I agree with quite a few of your points, just a couple of small footnotes.
1. Replacing apps with meaningful names
Ximian Desktop did this a few years ago, and it seems some of the major distributions are following suite. I mean, sure, GIMP is fine for us but place your average Office Worker (TM) in front of your average Linux distro menu, and the guranteed reaction is “What the feck?”. Sure, you could waste resources training them, but why bother? (scale up five minutes times 1 million and what do you get?)
If you do some research, you’ll see the Proposal for GNOME 2.0 Menu Structure at http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/proposals/menus.html#1. The author suggests “Reduce the number of “G”isms, Minimize product name usage, Separation of programs and actions, Verb based descriptions (mostly)” etc.
Point made.
2. Outdated Software
Frankly, I don’t think a lot of corporations give a toss about whether they’re using the latest and greatest. How many companies do you think are still using 2000, or even, *shudder* NT4. If you check out the IDC article, http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2291/IDG020103upgrade/, you’ll see my point.
Sure, new is nice, but if a stable, well-tested program with a proven trackrecord can do the job, why not? Seriously, go to netcraft, and see what OSes are used. Most corporations tend to stick to proven products with a verified track record.
*. Next three of four
The idea is that Sun is implementing these in a way it sees fit – that is, whether they be robust, scalable, easy to use etc. I haven’t tried them myself to be a judge of how successful they are, but just saying “Oh, but haven’t other companies done this” isn’t really a valid argument. The computer industry is all about taking someone’s idea, reshaping it and reimplementing it in a way you see better.
8. Windows Interopability
No, it’s about making it easy for users to switch between them.
Finally, for others – that’s 200 million *target* deployment – there’s probably pages of fine print – more info here http://lwn.net/Articles/58197/.
Bye,
Victor
<irony>
1) Relabel an old version of SuSE as “Sun’s Linux”.
2) Hype.
3) IPO – uh, wait, no they can’t do that…
</irony>
We are getting a constant stream of PR releases from Sun here on OSNews (at the rate of 1~2 per week).The fact is, Sun doesn’t have a desktop strategy. Sun doesn’t even sell desktop machines. And trying to get a share of the Linux desktop market is going to lead them nowhere.
So, again: why don’t these guys get a direction ?
“The fact is, Sun doesn’t have a desktop strategy. Sun doesn’t even sell desktop machines. And trying to get a share of the Linux desktop market is going to lead them nowhere. ”
Then the sun machine sitting on… you guessed it: my desktop, must be some sort of cruel joke from my imagination.
Sun has always had the ability to be a force on the client, they’ve just never put in the kind of effort needed. If they can get sparc hardware cost down, performance up and a modern user-friendly GUI on top of Solaris with a strong marketing plan they can become a real option on the client.
They don’t need Intel/AMD — Sparc is better.
They don’t need JDS — Solaris and Looking Glass will do.
They already have Java but simply need to put the same marketing effort put into Java into Sun Microsystems the company and all of it’s products.
The answers are all there they need to stop asking the wrong questions.
Whatever Sun machine you have on your desk is either a Sun workstation or some other kind of 200~300MHz small box that Sun has manufactured over time – outdated, obsolete and expensive.
Anecdotal issues aside, Sun’s desktop market share is zero, or something very, very close to zero.
Just as a reminder, Intel and AMD are shipping > 160 million x86 desktop and notebook processors per year.
Of these, let us assume 2% will run Linux (3.2 million), 75% of which are going into desktop machines (2.4 million).
Assuming Sun manages to get 5% of the Linux desktop market, that’s 120.000 Linux boxes running some sort of Sun desktop system, i.e. 0.075% desktop market share.
And even that would take a miracle…
Ah yes, about the 200 million sales in China: very funny. As though the Chinese were going to pay for Sun’s version of Linux when they can get it for free…
<irony>
1) Relabel an old version of SuSE as “Sun’s Linux”.
2) Hype.
3) IPO – uh, wait, no they can’t do that…
</irony>
You know, much as I’ve been critical of Sun in a previous post, I’m not necessarily convinced this is true. As I understand it, if you filter out the hype about WalMart pcs and other distractions, the advantage of the JDS is that it’s pre-configured out of the box to work with the Java Enterprise System server and middleware stack.
So of course, the usefulness of lack thereof of the JDS depends entirely on how good the Java Enterprise System is. And I’ve seen very little about that.
Sun types: I’ve seen the “compare how much money you’d save” survey, but I haven’t seen much in the way of details. Please reallocate some of your hype people from JDS to JES for a little bit.
“Whatever Sun machine you have on your desk is either a Sun workstation or some other kind of 200~300MHz small box that Sun has manufactured over time – outdated, obsolete and expensive.”
Tzzzz wrong again, it has dual 1.2 GHz US III’s, which is neither outdated nor obsolete by a long margin. It is expensive that is for sure, but it gets the job done…
I will not take you seriously as you not only don’t know what you are talking about, but you go around making assumptions out of your derriere. Keep the zealotry alive!
Cheers…
“…it has dual 1.2 GHz US III’s…”
So it’s a US$ 10,000+ Sun workstation. Thanks, you have just proved my point…