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.
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.