
What Sun Should Do (by a Sun employee) - soundsop
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/11/24/What-Sun-Should-Do
======
jhancock
I just installed NetBeans 6.5 "ruby edition" after reading this post and just
had to come back here to explain why Tim's thesis of "we have many great
complementing products to create a coherent whole" (my words, not Tim's) is
mostly an anchor around Sun's neck.

I download NetBeans 6.5 (ruby only version) and the installer tells me it
needs to use 145 MB for the install. I tell it ok and it asks for my root
password and I give it and away it goes. The install gleefully tells me at
some point it is installing "GlassFish v3 Prelude". WTF!!! Stop doing things
like this!!!

About a year or so ago, I seriously took into consideration adopting Solaris
10. I read the basic install docs and tried to get a clean and basic install
of Solaris. No such luck. I wanted a server OS and the default install gives
me not 1 but 3 desktop solutions, multiple Sun products like a directory and
mail server and yes, 3 versions of Java setup in a "great" multi-java install
method. This was done to enable the multiple other stuff to work as sun's
various products it was jamming down my throat had different Java
requirements. So what would I need to get a "slimmed down Solaris install"? I
would need to read through a thousand pages of docs and write install scripts.
So what did I do instead? I switched to ubuntu server. Why is ubuntu server
great? Because it does not have other products it is trying to "up-sell" me.

Sun thinks that because it is giving you some free tech that it spent lots of
money creating that they have the user's permission to shove more stuff on the
user. This is a big problem. If I want GlassFish, I'll install it. If I want
any form of X-windows or Java on my server, I'll ask for it.

~~~
hopeless
I installed it yesterday (on Windows) and there's a big fat "Install Glassfish
v3 Prelude" checkbox on one of the first pages. Unticking this should work for
you. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt 'cos perhaps the *nix installer is
very different

~~~
jhancock
nice to hear the windows folks get to opt out ;). I didn't see such a choice
on the OS X installer.

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shimon
Sun is the General Motors of the computer industry. They used to do tons of
stuff for everyone because their products and expertise were unrivaled. As the
demand for big machines picked up in the 90s, they did well and sold a lot of
stuff to a rapidly expanding market. But now that we've all figured out that
smaller, cheaper machines are just as good, nobody can quite imagine how
they'll regain their past glory.

And that's the problem with recovery plans like this one: they're full of fine
ideas, and you could imagine the company picking a few and doing well at them.
But could they even match the efficiency and hard work of their scrappy Asian
competitors? They're gonna need some major inspiration to flip around a multi-
year trajectory of slow failure. The bus just doesn't have that kind of
turning radius, I'm afraid.

~~~
gaius
_we've all figured out that smaller, cheaper machines are just as good_

It's worse than that. All the kit that Sun sold in the 90s is still perfectly
usable. Why buy new _even if you want Sun?_

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zmimon
If I was running Sun I'd seriously look at splitting the company in two. The
software side is shackled by the fact that they need to move in a direction
that is going to erode revenue from the hardware side. As long as they are in
the same company you will have a tug of war between two sides pulling two
different ways and nobody going anywhere.

I agree with the software folks trying to become the best deployment platform
for web software. There's a window of opportunity while the JVM is ahead of
other VMs where Sun could pull this off if they can produce a super stable,
scalable, easy to deploy runtime that runs everything from PHP to Python, Ruby
and Groovy and make it a snap to deploy and manage. The catch is that I don't
think there's any chance they will achieve this if they try and tie it to
either Solaris or Sun hardware. That ship has sailed - hosting these days is
either linux or windows for all but the highest top tier. They need to
completely get over it and aggressively push themselves on linux.

~~~
jwilliams
> _The software side is shackled by the fact that they need to move in a
> direction that is going to erode revenue from the hardware side._

Unless they move into the cloud domain - in which case, their expertise in
both areas (software/hardware) will be complimentary and useful.

~~~
alexandros
come to think of it, sun may be the only company to have the entire stack of
technologies in house... chips, servers, os, VM, programming language,
development environment.. cloud computing seems an obvious direction.. perhaps
they are doing that already?

~~~
jwilliams
> perhaps they are doing that already?

Not really - the one piece of the puzzle that Sun doesn't really have is
services (aside from support).

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rbanffy
I would guess their major problem is lack of mindshare. All other problems
more or less come from that, including what appears to be a lack of focus.

They need to borrow a page from Apple's book and build a SPARC-based "Sun
mini" that's cool, desirable and cheap. It should also be the obvious choice
for a desktop platform for anyone who wants do develop for Java, Solaris or
whatever Sun thinks is strategic.

Getting CMT chips in the hands of maverick developers is vital if they want
people to develop for them. Parallel stuff is seen as cool and sexy and their
CMT SPARCs are built for it. I would buy a desktop Sun to "test the water",
but I wouldn't do the same with a rackmount server. If they have rackmount
servers going for USD 2700, they sure can do desktops for about USD 1000. If
they can make Ruby or Python do great threading with them, all the better as I
have no real desire to program in Java.

Back in the OpenWindows or CDE days, Solaris wasn't a terribly nice desktop
environment but today, with Gnome, it is every bit as good as, say, Ubuntu.
The right people should start seeing the Sun logo more and the huge userland
Unix-like OSs have is key.

And, while they are at it, the JAVA ticker was a stupid idea. Sun is, and
should be perceived as much more than that. SUNW was not a brilliant one (as
workstations were no longer relevant)

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babo
Good article, I liked what he wrote about the GNU tools and package
management. At my last try a few weeks ago I failed with OpneSolaris again
because of they ancient GCC version to compile the necessary software
elements, SUN's cc failed on that code with a different problem while it's
just fine on Linux or a OSX.

~~~
Herring
I wonder if/when it's ever going to occur to them that it's easier to work on
improving linux than it is to fight windows, mac AND linux by ... becoming
more like linux.

I especially loved this point - _"Will buyers accept a certain amount of lock-
in, or will they insist on zero barriers to exit?"_ Sun acts like it still
owns the market.

~~~
wmf
_Sun acts like it still owns the market._

And so do all the other cloud providers.

~~~
Herring
I don't know, google seems easy to get out of. Not that you'd ever want to
leave, of course. Mail/calendar/docs/rss can all be exported. Any artificial
restrictions I'm missing? App engine yeah, but it's barely up yet.

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s3graham
This might have been better as an email to one's executive team, rather than a
public blog post.

I'm not convinced about being a deployment platform. Sun's repeatedly been
eaten from below by "cheaper" alternatives of arguably lower quality (whether
Wintel, Linux, etc.). I'm not sure I buy that focusing on incremental
quality/performance improvements is going to be a winner now either.

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larryfreeman
Tim Bray is an amazing engineer. I used to work with him at Sun and I was
always impressed by him. He played a major part in the evolution of XML.

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atobe
Isn't this how they ended up with Java? FAIL.

Wasn't Patrick Naughton asked what Sun should do when he resigned?

Seems to be the new black - winning the mind share, losing the battle.

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/java.saga_pr.html>

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jhancock
Tim does a good job at highlighting some key tech held by Sun. But there is no
clear thesis that even if there is significant adoption of these technologies
that Sun makes money.

I do hope some of these technologies keep moving forward. I do not see a great
way for Sun to profit from them.

~~~
gaius
One of Solaris rock-solid advantage over Linux was the guaranteed stable ABI.
Except Sun shot themselves in the foot by introducing Java which made it
irrelevant...

~~~
andrewf
Someone was going to make it irrelevant. And .NET doesn't run on Solaris.

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sahaj
agreed that sun needs to make some bold moves (besides changing the stock
ticker from SUNW to JAVA) in order to get out of the mess they are in.

the changes that the writer suggests are bold and do require a new team and a
lot of capital. looking at sun's balance sheet
<[http://finance.google.com/finance?q=java>](http://finance.google.com/finance?q=java>),
it doesn't look like they will be able to do much of anything. i think sun is
sitting around and barely making do because they just really want someone else
to come in and take over. they've been slowly cutting jobs for years in order
to reduce OP EX.

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dcurtis
This reminds me, in some small way, of the Peanut Butter Manifesto.

Except that Sun is (as far as I can tell) failing at everything they are
spreading their peanut butter on.

------
known
Integrating JVM within Intel CPUs will enhance Sun business.

~~~
hxa7241
Didn't they design or build a Java co-processor about 10 years ago -- what
happened with that?

