Sun to sink in the west?

ComputerWorld ^ | 06 July 2006 | Manek Dubash

[ShadowAce]

Sun Microsystems is in deep trouble.

So say a number of analysts, most recently Brian Richardson from Meta Group who says the company has got it all wrong, with its hardware seen as proprietary and expensive.

Richardson said that it was hard to see any upside for Sun -- and he's not alone. Merrill Lynch analyst Steve Milunovich wrote last month to CEO Scott McNealy and the board: "The company has gone from being pure in vision and predictable in financial performance to an underachieving, bloated, unfocused reflection of its former self."

Sun has lost money consistently ever since the end of the boom -- when it boasted it was the dot in dot-com -- and is about to post another set of quarterly and annual results. It declined to comment on what those results might contain.

However, revenues have declined year-on-year from US$18.25 billion in 2001 to just over US$11 billion in 2005. It lost US$11 million in 2005.

The company has also shed thousands of jobs in recent years. In May, it announced it would slice a massive 13 percent -- some 5,000 people -- off its employment roster; last September it cut over 1,000 posts, which itself followed cuts of 11 percent in 2002, and 10 percent the year before.

It's lost people at the top-end of the company too, most notably last month when company co-founder Bill Joy quit, and when co-founder and chief Scott McNealy announced in May that he too was leaving.

Sun used to have a US$7 billion cash pile but this year's accounts will show a sizeable dent as a result of the US$4.1 billion acquisition of StorageTek which it completed last September.

While you can't attribute such decline to one single factor -- execution in particular being tough to pin down -- it's notable that HP and IBM have been eating Sun's lunch at the top end of the Unix market, while cheaper Linux boxes have been making serious in-roads into its systems business lower down.

In the meantime, analysts have suggested moves that Sun could make to stem the rot. They include the urgings in 2004 of Merrill Lynch to buy either Novell or Red Hat in order to get into the Linux market -- a suggestion it's yet to take up.

This is hardly surprising given that Linux would offer Sun very little differentiation, and Sun trades on the perception that its products are a cut above the common herd.

On the plus side, Sun does have revenues from Java to buoy it up -- a revenue stream likely to grow as more mobile phones incorporate it -- plus the promise of new developments on the SPARC processor front which appears to remain its priority.

It has also open sourced Solaris and parts of UltraSPARC in a move that's been described as jumping on a bandwagon, or attempting to gain free R&D.

However, the market is consolidating on the x86 architecture, making Sun look even more like a niche player. Even Intel with massive marketing dollars has failed to capture the mass imaginations of Unix systems buyers with Itanium.

And the trend is likely to accelerate as the one-box-one-application approach becomes less important with the advent of robust virtualization technology.

[Rifleman]

The core and essence of Java is the VM (Virtual Machine) which is a computer that exists only as an emulator/simulator/interpreter running on the various examples of real computer hardware. The VM is designed to execute the compiled Java language efficiently and to provide security features that would be hard to do any other way. A lot of effort went into making it work well and securely on the internet.

Think of it as a mask that the real computer wears so every computer looks just the same to programs written in Java, so you don't have to rewrite them for every computer.

The Java language also comes with a huge set of libraries, written in Java, that provide complex and powerful features to the programmer, ie, user interfaces, database access, networking, remote processing, server functions, you name it.

Looked at as just a language, it is just a paste up of C/C++ with some of C++'s most baroque features removed or improved, then tweeked to live on a VM. It is mostly designed to not frighten C programmers. It should have been some flavor of Lisp, but that would have been too scary for the PHBs and many average programmers.

[rzeznikj at stout]

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[zeugma]

How could I be John Kerry, when the severs for John Kerry and the DNC all run on Linux?

Looks like another sideways slam to me at the fine folks who run this site on LAMP technologies. 

Come on GE, why don't you just come right out and call Jim a leftist for using Linux? 

[Golden Eagle]

As I've told you a dozen times before, because he's not a leftist nor are all Linux users. The ones we have to watch out for are the ones that spend all their time pushing it on everyone, then deny there are any leftist connections at all, such as the posse we see on this thread.

[zeugma]

Your protestations to the contrary would be a bit more believable if you weren't such and obvious troll.