Despite Sun Microsystems’ recent financial calamities, industry veterans say the battered company is hardly on the verge of collapse. Can it draw on its history of being a technical innovator? Elsewhere, “the new Java desktop has the Windows look-and-feel, but its StarOffice has so far had a lukewarm response. Can Sun convince users accustomed to MS-Office, to switch from Windows? Read at CIOL.
Sun: Battered Company Maps Strategy for Comeback
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Sun has been slowly and painfully transitioning their business model into one they believe will be profitable for the future, and in the mean time have taken a number of losses, which has left the doorway open for a large amount of anti-Sun FUD to be spread by Sun’s opponents…
Even if Sun never became profitable again and continued losing money at the current rate, it’d be at least 6 years before the company ran itself into the ground. They have $5.7 billion in liquid assets, and $13 billion in total assets, with $1.53 billion in long term debt. They’ve been losing money at a rate of approximately $2 billion per year, so provided they do nothing to increase revenue or decrease spending, it would take them at least 6 years to exhaust their assets (although they’d be certain to become a takeover target before that)
Sources:
http://www.edgar-online.com/bin/edgardoc/finSys_main.asp?dcn=000119…
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001757203…
Sun will survive as long as they have so many really good people working for them. There is no doubt they will find some avenues to bring in the bucks.
Off topic though, I have downloaded Solaris 10 for X86 (the free version) and installed it on an old K-6 500 box. It actually runs quite well! Of course it has no chance against the free Linux or Microsoft products. But, a fun progect to mess with on a spare box.
The only problem with the darn thing is that the last CD download always gives me a corrupted file when I unzip it.
Heck of a way to try to show off your system to prospective customers.
anyone else have this problem?
I agree with the other two posters. Sun will “survive” in the same sense that sgi is surviving. But I don’t see an explosive growth out of sunw any time soon.
btw: sgi share price up about 30% today. I still think sgi is doomed long term.
Wow, these guys who love MS Office and no other office suite such as OpenOffice or StarOffice sure must have a lot of money to spend on IT. I wish I was that rich.
I think Sun could do better than HP. I don’t know if they could do better than IBM, but Sun has the opportunity to use Linux and its community kindly to improve profits on their hardware and possibly even software markets. But they have to play fair, using Linux as a lower-cost solution to their premium Solaris. If they try to push Linux into a little box it will only backfire in their face. Linux is excellent across all their hardware, for customers that want discounts, etc. And Solaris is great for premium service and performance, like production environments. Linux is better for low-cost hardware, DP 1U racks with little to no redundancy, Solaris is better for large servers. But both can run across the board, so my recommendation is to exploit both and set the price points where the customers want them, with a reasonable profit margin.
Oh, and SGI has given a lot of technology to PC and Linux users. I’m not counting them out yet and I will always think of them with respect and admiration.
Oh, and SCO only hurts Sun. If I were them I’d cut all ties and appologize for the statements they made.
And HP sucks.
Solaris is lower in cost than Linux. It’s much lower in cost.
Remember SUN’s Java Desktop System.
Well this all hedges on volume (i.e. commodity) pricing. If SUN is able to achive volume sales by cutting out middleware vendors, than business sofware will sell at commodity (mass production) prices.
Sun, at least, is building new technology. While they have not been executing well, they have not lost touch with what originally made them a great company.
HP, on the other hand, continues to outsource their entire company. The latest casualty is their laser printers, once the hallmark of the company.
http://theinquirer.net/?article=11986
Let us hope Sun pulls it together, stops their incessant lying, and gets back to shipping great innovative value-based technology.
SUN has shifted and has now put all of their weight upon Java. So if you wanted to attack SUN than I think that you should bring down Java and than the whole company will crash.
IBM is using Java as their platform and they have nowhere else to go, that’s why they want Java to be open source, because SUN controls Java as a proprietary product. SUN could choose not to implement a virtual machine runtime for Linux (one day this will probably happen…once SUN acquires volume).
SUN intends to compete with Microsoft but they will not compete with Linux, because Linux is not a proprietary product and vendors are constrained by the GPL. That is why SUN will develop their Solaris product, so that their research and development can be private and not distributed to all of their competiors for free under the GPL. There are also other motivations related to control that make up the reasons why vendors so not market Linux. Obviously only organizations of a certain structure or organizational design can market Linux but even they use Java as their business platform, and do not write native code on Linux.
If Java became open source like IBM says it wants to happen, I don’t think that they would want it to be GPL but only LGPL or else IBM would not be able to charge money for their middleware…only the service…but maybe that’s okay with them???
Sunw’s strategy is to scare people away from linux, by *constantly* threatening scox lawsuits. The message is clear: it is only safe to buy from Sunw.
>>Solaris is “indemnified” and runs no risk of being burdened with copyright lawsuits like the SCO Group’s against IBM Corp., McNealy said. <<
01 October 2003
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11886
>>Sun can use open-source software to build their own stuff like Mad Hatter (its Linux desktop software), but “don’t try this at home,” he warned in a recent interview, “because you don’t have an intellectual property arsenal to fight SCO<<
19 September 2003
http://news.com.com/2452-7344-5079251.html
>>Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of software, have emphasized Sun’s focus on indemnification, particularly with its Linux version of the Java Enterprise Desktop System, as a safeguard for enterprises worried about legal issues such as the actions The SCO Group Inc. has taken with Linux. <<
17 September 2003
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1270796,00.asp
>>”Most importantly, you don’t have software indemnification, were it the case SCO wants to come after you,” said McNealy. <<
15 September 2003
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1268310,00.asp
for those looking for the solaris download site here it is http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get.html
“Sunw’s strategy is to scare people away from linux, by *constantly* threatening scox lawsuits. The message is clear: it is only safe to buy from Sunw.”
While my intention is not to feed Sun’s FUD machine, it is true that IP regarding software has not been fully worked out, yet. There is always a risk/reward balance in business, so each buyer needs to weigh the risk of being targetted by a frivolous lawsuit versus the cost of Sun’s indemnification. This is actually very fair, and it lets the market decide exactly how valuable that indemnification is. Sun is betting that it has value. Time will tell.
The FUD spouting trolls are out in force…
>>Solaris is ?indemnified? and runs no risk of being burdened with copyright lawsuits like the SCO Group?s against IBM Corp., McNealy said. <<
Your point? There are lawsuits underway which may or may not undermine the IP rights of those selling it. Sun has offered indemnification not only for Solaris but for Linux when it is used as part of the Java Desktop System. See Schwartz’s comments on the matter: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1274623,00.asp
HP is also indemnifying their Linux customers: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3082241 Does this somehow make HP evil in your incredibly skewed view of the situation? They are merely offering their customers legal protection during a time when part of their product’s IP is being disputed in court.