“It was the leading supplier of the computer servers that fueled the dot-com boom, the Silicon Valley star whose name was nearly synonymous with New Economy chic. But after two years on the bleeding edge of the bust, Sun Microsystems Inc. has fallen victim to the commoditization of the computers that do corporate America’s heavy lifting.” Read the article at Boston.com.
Sun Microsystems Eclipsed by Internet Bust, Strategy
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
what a shame
It is not of wonder. IRIX, Solaris, Tru64 and AIX too are all dead or dying a slow death. HP-UX doesn’t do as well as in the past either.
And it ain’t Microsoft to blame this time, it is Linux.
Companies are migrating to cheaper solutions, the traditional UNIX companies has failed to see the changes in the market, failed to follow the (cheap) pace, so they are getting phased out. We will of course still have commercial UNIX for the years to come, but their significance will be much smaller. I wrote an editorial about it herea few weeks ago: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3649
Sstrategy?
It may be a typo but or… I know their are R and K Strategies, and while applied to reproduction they can easily be applied to economics (and are), but do you mean they were using the S strategy? If so, what is the S Stagt?
Let’s review…
Sun’s stock price has 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=…
Sun is the leading Linux/Unix vendor:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3751
Sun is turning a profit:
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2003/04/14/daily45.h…
However I forsee the naysayers saying Sun is doomed, arguing the semantics of the word “profit” trying to downplay the fact that Sun is profitable, and calling for massive reorganization at Sun to solve problems which I will admit exist, but don’t doom Sun as a company. As long as Sun keeps doing what they’re doing, selling some of the world’s most robust and scalable systems and providing excellent support, they’ll be fine.
Unix is dying at the hands of Linux, this is true. All around you see cheaper, faster ways of doing things with Linux. Sun is late to grasp this. Is Sun doomed? Oh, I don’t think so but Sun will have to transform itself in order to survive. There will always be a place for Solaris but Sun has to realize it will be a small niche.
>> Unix is dying at the hands
>> of Linux, this is true.
More importantly, Unix is going to face stiff competition from Windows. Did you try Windows 2003 Server? It is so nice and mature, and if the Unix folks continue with their current nonsense and laziness, Windows will be all over the place before you know it
>>
As long as Sun keeps doing what they’re doing, selling some of the world’s most robust and scalable systems and providing excellent support, they’ll be fine.
>>
I don’t think so. If they continue with what they did in the past, they will end up with a very niche market, basically catering to a sun/solaris hardcore fan base much like apple. Sun hardware is way to overpriced in the current market. Not many corporations are going to shell out that kind of money just for the marginal advantages you get thereby. I was visiting a data center belonging to one of the biggest isps/telecoms recently, and guess what? They were replacing like hundreds of Sun machines with RedHat on Intel. That’s the general trend.
They have lots of interviews with people about how the current form of software development is wrong. Pretty interesting too. My guess is that Sun is planning to bring something big to the market some time soon and is currently preparing people for it.
> My guess is that Sun is planning to bring something big to the market
Yeah, a 10×10 beowulf cluster of older, unsold SPARCs.
Ok…this has nothing to do with the article, but I suddenly realized why IBM called their IDE eclipse.
Seems like it means that it eclipses anything that sun could produce.
Quite a clever play on words
Disclosure: I work for Sun. In fact, I’ve worked at Sun long enough to remember the Unix-is-dead stories in the mid-1990s. According to everybody at the time, Windows was going to take over everything, and anything Unix would be relegated to the high end. We at Sun stuck to our knitting: we could see that the SMP trend was set to explode on the supply side and the the Internet was going to explode on the demand side — and we knew that we were uniquely positioned to take advantage of both trends. The Windows hype grew and grew, with the wire services finally kicking in to write stories about the death of Unix. Then there came Scalability Day on May 20, 1997 — the day that Microsoft overplayed their hand. Scalability Day was a disaster for Microsoft: they managed to highlight just how _little_ they scaled instead of how much. It punctured the Windows hype bubble, and paved the way for the Unix renaissance of the late 1990s. (Don’t take my word for it: google “scalability day” + “I feel lucky”.) Today, few — if any — really believe that Windows will displace everything else everywhere.
Scalability Day held many lessons for a young buck like myself (or at least, young at the time):
1. While it’s very popular to cite examples in the history of technology where cheap “good-enough” technology has displaced the better (but more expensive) extant technology, there exist counterexamples where “good-enough” never grew out of being just barely good enough for some tasks and decidedly _not_ good enough for many. Disrupting innovations exist (and even abound) — but not every cheap, good-enough innovation is a disrupting innovation.
2. Journalists sell copy. They are responsible for writing stories people want to read, not for making accurate predictions, presenting a balanced viewpoint or even making valid observations. Unlike a company, a journalist can be arbitrarily wrong for arbitrarily long and still live to tell the tale. Journalists aren’t going to apologize for being wrong, because it wasn’t their job to be right in the first place.
3. Hype doesn’t last forever. Hype is like tyranny: it can last a damn long time, but it never lasts forever — and when it ends, it ends in dramatic fashion. In the technology business, patience and focus are as important as vision and execution; a technology company that starts believing the hype has forfeited any leadership that it may have had.
I don’t want to imply that Sun isn’t a very serious situation — we are. But it is irresponsible journalism to write an article on Sun’s anti-orthodoxy without mentioning the number of times that we got it right when the rest of the world got it wrong.
The irony to all this has been that at this time — when the Sun-is-dead articles seem to be coming at the rate of several per day — we currently have in development the most innovative operating system technologies that we have ever developed at Sun. (And all other judgements about Sun aside, I think it’s safe to say that we have a known history for OS innovation.) These technologies have been under development for quite some time, and it’s been incredibly frustrating that we haven’t been able to talk about them. But the long silence is coming to an end, and in the coming months you can expect to hear a lot more about what we’ve been up to. (And if you’re a long-time Solaris user, clear your lap to make room for your jaw — we have enough revolutionary technologies on deck that if one doesn’t blow you away, the next surely will.)
This isn’t meant to be chest-thumping — it’s just meant to be a reminder that we ain’t dead by a long shot: morale here is high (if exhausted), cash flow is positive, attrition is zero and we’re bringing great technology to market.
I’m going to get back to work; I’ll let everyone else get back to the hackneyed comparisons between Sun and SGI/DEC/Apple, etc.
Told ya! They have something!
Good luck. Linux seems to be here to stay and overcome its hype with real advancements with the help of engineering minds of IBM, SGI, RH and elsewhere, all united to make the kernel/OS better. If you think you can beat this and stay profitable in the next 2-4 years, more power to you. To me, it mostly looks like all traditional Unices are losing to Linux day by day and the biggest mistake you can do right now is to understimate Linux. Personally, I hope traditional Unices survive, simply because more OSes, more OSNews. It’s all business at the end of the day.
To date, IBM, SGI, RH and others have not been able to get many of their changes bought back by Linus. Witness their inability to get _crash dumps_ into Linux 2.6. Crash dumps are an incredibly essential, noncontroversial part of a modern operating system — which is why every vendor who commits to Linux immediately tries to get this patch bought back. And yet Linus won’t buy it back, largely for _religious_ reasons. To paraphrase Jon Lovitz portraying Michael Dukakis: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
For all of the supposedly “revolutionary” development in Linux, the new features in 2.6 are incredibly boring and pedestrian. Or is it that everyone else finds new IDE frameworks incredibly exciting and innovative?
Linux is here to stay, yes, until the SCO thing turns sour somehow, which is very unlikely. All the major players seem to be flocking to Linux like a bunch of fanboys. I wonder, if some big corporation could pick up some BSD variant perhaps? Maybe OpenBSD, since it’s famous for it’s security?
They are flocking to Linux because of its hype. BSD doesn’t have the hype, neither the “security” (in their minds) of the GPL. Bottomline is though, even if Linux is where it is today because of all this hype, it DOES get advancements because of these fanboys that flock to it. It is like the chicken and egg problem, but reversed.
i think the major problem of sun is not so much linux (solaris as a server system is still more advanced), but it’s linux on rel. cheap x86-systemes who have, due to the ghz-battle between amd and intel during the last 3 years made tremendous performance-advancements.
so in consequence, price/perfomance-ratio is much better than sun’s one, and especially in times like these, companies are taking every possibility they see to replace the good but much too costly sunservers with cheaper hardware, which in turn is driving intel, amd (hammer) and other hardwarevendors (as well as win server and linux) to develop even more powerfull hardware.
so again, peope aren’t turning their back to sun because of the qualities of linux, but because sun’s hardware is much too expensive! admitted, if reliability and ultraperformance is your #1 priority, there’s still nothing better than sun’s (or whatever vendors) mulitmilliondollar unix big iron, but the pressure from below is rising, and the market for sun is getting smaller.
one move that could rescue sun is bringing hardwarecosts of the sparc-architecture on a comparable level to x86-hardware, but that won’t be possible.
another one would be to incorporate x86-processors, but sun is dedicated to sparc, i guess. also, in this case people who would prefer the maturity and features of solaris could buy cheap hardware elsewhere-sun as a softwareshop?!
not for long, because linux is catching up.
so now they’re trying to bring a 30-fold increase in processing power to lower the price/performance-ratio, but afaik that will only work for specific purposes. i really also doubt that it will in reality be sustained 30 times faster on any application, but never say never.
in any case, this move won’t rescue sun imo.
so if you won’t surprise us with some real bang (whatever that might be is beyond at least my imagination), it seems sun will just slowly fade away like dec/alpha.
sad…
To the guy reciting 1990s history: And what about Windows Servers? Sure, the idea that NT 3/4 could displace Unix has turned out to be laughable, but do you seriously believe that the story is ended?
Don’t ever underestimate Microsoft my friend, they have money, they have talent, and they have more determination than all their competitors combined. They almost never get it right the first time, but they almost invariably get it right in the long run. Look at Office. Look at IE. Look at SQL. Look at MSN. And the list goes on.
Whether you like or not, Windows servers will eventually compete head-to-head with Unix systems, in whatever category or feature you care to compare. Heck, Windows 2003 even comes with a mail server!!!! If Unix vendors don’t get their acts together Windows servers will not only match but exceed their unix counterparts sooner than you think. For now, I am just happy that Linux is here to help get some of the ground sun is loosing.
I said that “few — if any — really believe that Windows will displace everything else everywhere”; I suppose you are one of the lucky few. And yes, I seriously believe the story has ended. The big iron makers are no longer betting on Microsoft to push their high margin iron, they’re betting on Linux. This leaves no one to pay for the features that Windows needs in order to penetrate the mid-range, let alone the high-end. (Microsoft is a volume-based company down to its marrow; they will always focus on whatever sells the most licenses.)
Monday, June 16, 2003 2:22:08
Its a shame that Linux may be Sun’s worst enemy. Initiatives that Sun needs to focus on is improving the admin useability of Solaris/SolarisX86 and knocking down the price of their hardware so that IT shops would consider a Sun box.
To attempt to deliver a Sun/Linux solution and at the same time offer Solaris to customers does not lend credibility and dilutes the value of Solaris. If someone buys a low end box from Sun it should ship with Solaris and the full support of Sun. Why even bother with the option of Linux? Sun needs to tell their customers that Solaris is better than Linux and can be deployed on all of their hardware and to X86 hardware. They also need to show that Solaris can evolve faster than Windows and Linux and that if you have an X86 box that meets the HCL the best thing to put on it is not Windows or Linux but Solaris. That adds value and makes people and the market gravitate to your solutions.
Java is a great product, and they should try to make more money out of Java instead of just promoting their hardware.
I really appreciate a free version of Sun One/NetBeans, but for their own good: dont make a free version of the next great java thing you build.
We all like free stuff, but free and profit don’t go hand in hand.
Even if Windows does become stable, there are fundamental problems with the OS. Here are two.
1) Registry – Microsoft has mixed user and system info into one large messy directory store. You might not think this is a bad idea, but I always get heartburns whenever I make changes to the system or install new software and reboot any mission critical server.
2) Logs/Home – Logs and Home directories are stored on the C: drive by default. This means that the system drive can easily be filled up accidentally and not only crash your system, but make in unbootable.