
Oracle: OK. So Maybe We Are Cutting Sun to Profitability - davidw
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100607/oracle-ok-so-maybe-we-are-cutting-sun-to-profitability/?mod=ATD_rss
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ovi256
Some 640 millions earmarked for severance payments ? How many people will they
fire ? At five digits per average severance package, which I find extremely
generous, it comes out to a five digits number, which seems huge to me.

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hga
If this is correct:

" _some 80 percent of it evidently earmarked for employee severance payments
at Sun’s European and Asian outposts_ "

Then the numbers may be significantly different due to differences in employee
law and culture.

Also, if they're closing down offices, e.g. consolidating them with existing
Oracle sales and support ones world wide, there's all sorts of other expenses
involved.

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jrockway
It's pretty sad to see a legend in computing like Sun die. But the good news
is that Java will probably go with it, which will be one of the best things to
happen to computing since ... Java. (Hey, it got GC accepted in industry.)

This makes me especially happy because I can recite the "your language is
dead" line to Java developers now:

    
    
      Java developer: You're a loser, Perl is dead.
      Me: Yeah, dead.  When was the last major release of Java?
      Java developer: 3 years ago.
      Me: Ah.  We got a new version of Perl last month.
    

This will never completely offset the bitterness from a career of hearing this
constantly, but it will offset it a little ;)

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samstokes
I have no fondness for Java the language, but it would be a big shame if the
JVM died, or stopped being actively developed. As a substrate for better
languages to run on, it offers a lot (e.g. world-class GC and JIT, cross-
platform availability, good tool support).

Java is verbose and clunky, but Ruby, Python, Scala and Clojure are all pretty
good languages...

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nkassis
Well, I'm guessing they are firing the entire sales force and costumer care
people. It's redundant in their view and they have been blaming them for Sun's
issues. Oracle really wanted the engineers it seems but they aren't doing a
good job at keeping them around.

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illumin8
For some reason I highly doubt that. Sales teams never get cut... engineers
always do. Sales teams are revenue generating and engineers are just a cost
center.

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etherael
Unless you already have an abundance of really good sales people and a
shortage of really good engineers and you just acquired an organisation in the
exact opposite situation, maybe?

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hga
Didn't Oracle say they're hiring thousands of salesmen to tell Sun stuff?

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etherael
Which you would do if you thought the current ones weren't doing a very good
job, no?

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hga
Didn't Larry Ellison said a big part of Sun's problem was that they didn't
have enough?

He said something in the direction of my thesis on this, that they'd
outsourced too much of their sales to "VARs" and such, but I think he may have
also included higher end sales.

Anyway, his public objections have been to Sun's upper management in pretty
much all areas (e.g. he said even Sun's engineers couldn't succeed due to
them), not the individual salesmen, although of course he wouldn't complain
about the latter if he was planning on keeping any of them.

Surely it makes the most sense to establish a new structure and retain the
existing Sun salesmen who thrive in it.

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etherael
I agree, it will be interesting to see where it goes.

