Posted on 05/04/2008 4:19:26 PM PDT by mnehring
SUN MICROSYSTEMS HAS ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF THE GREAT Silicon Valley sagas. Founded in 1982 by a trio of Valley legends -- Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim and Scott McNealy -- the company (ticker: JAVA) has been the launching pad for a variety of trend-setting technologies, including SPARC microprocessors, the Solaris operating system and the now-ubiquitous Java programming language, among many others. (JAVA:
12.64, -3.69, -22.6%) has gone through some tumultuous years over the past decade, including an astounding run-up in its stock during the bubble years, which was followed by an equally momentous collapse. Two years ago, McNealy stepped down as CEO (he remains chairman) in favor of the bloggin', pony-tailed Jonathan Schwartz. It was a dramatic change in personal style from McNealy's sardonic approach, and part of a badly needed corporate overhaul. And Schwartz certainly has made changes designed to revitalize growth. But the latest evidence suggests they haven't really worked. Last week, Sun shocked the Street with an extremely ugly performance in its fiscal third quarter, ended in March. Revenues in the quarter were down 0.5% from the year-ago period; the company reported a loss of four cents a share, far worse than the profit of 18 cents the Street had forecast. Sun suffered a disturbing 10% drop in U.S. revenues in the quarter. Computer-hardware sales were down 1.8%, while storage-systems revenue fell 5.4%. Sun said sales of computers and storage systems each came up $100 million short of internal projections. Ugh.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Thoughts on JAVA & CSCO, are they old school and bound to keep going down or will we see at least a short run up? With JAVA's lower price, is there potential buyout potential?
Rabid investor club ping
Hello?!?! Who wrote this article. Did they forget that Bill Joy was one of the founders of Sun, and remained it's Chief Scientist until 2003. (also Vaughn Pratt is considered a founder too)
Sun has been hurt by the open source movement, but Schwartz was a horrible choice as CEO. Open sourcing Solaris isn’t going to make them a single dime, and GPL’ing it was downright dumb, and buying MySQL for a billion dollars was utterly stupid. MySQL was worth nowhere near that. They’ve never even broken 100 million in annual sales. Scwhartz burned one-fifth of Sun’s cash reserve on that deal. That alone should be reason to fire him.
Sun’s most promising prospect for growth... their revolutionary new line of multicore, low power chips... is going almost unnoticed by the public. Sun should be out hawking those CPU’s every single day.
I saw Schwartz speak at a morning breakfast of the Churchill Club shortly after he was elevated to CEO. All he could talk about was “new economy” nonsense and blather about giving things away for free and how that was the key to Sun’s future success. Most of the audience walked away shaking their heads in disbelief.
IBM is eating Sun’s lunch on the hardware front. IBM’s Power6 processors are a match for and better than anything out there for enterprise iron.
Is it my imagination, or has a lot of the high tech industry stagnated?
I think what is needed is a new PC hardware concept. Leaving the Microsoft PC paradigm behind, and going for a radical new redesign based on starting from “scratch”. I can see several strong possibilities:
The entire system is designed around a new class of microprocessor. Complete laser bus architecture. OS and major software on USB-3 drives. Wireless except for AC.
One of its biggest selling points is fully voice communications and AI. Via an Internet connection, the AI has a “higher brain” supercomputer to help it learn all about its user. The idea is that it talks back and forth with its user, in an elaborate process to tailor itself to their individual computing needs.
It acts as a teacher for any subject the user is interested in, a multimedia tutor. It reads, out loud, what the user wants to read; very useful because few people really enjoy reading. It surfs the net by voice, and actually has some idea what you are looking at.
The big question is designing “out of the box”, to make it different enough, and so far better than, a PC that people have to buy them.
Did television networks make any money despite the fact that they were “giving away” their product?
Right. They’ll simply plaster the side of every server they sell with NASCAR type sponsor logos. That’ll work. I’m sure that revenue will more than make up for giving away Solaris and Java.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.