

Sun announcing up to 6000 (18%) layoffs - andr
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aq_sEpeurux8&refer=home

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startingup
Sun's current cost structure doesn't begin to be supported by revenue. It has
~32,000 employees, and makes $12 billion in hardware revenue, with declining
gross margins (Dell, Rackspace etc. are commoditizing servers). Their
"strategy" for growth is open source, but after 10 years, they still haven't
shown how they will make money out of Java. MySQL is a $100 million a year
business, respectable, but there is no way to see how it grows to billions
without pissing off and driving away the very users that made MySQL
successful.

If I were them, I would cut deep, real deep, like 50% lay-off, assume further
drastic erosion in their margins (and plan to be profitable with such drastic
erosion), and crucially, with a slim-but-sharply-focused R&D division, focus
on coming up with innovations that people are willing to pay for.

Apple did it, Sun could. It has the heart of a great company faintly ticking
somewhere deep inside, but alas, current leadership hasn't shown it is up to
the job.

~~~
ojbyrne
The comparison to Apple is apt. Back in their heyday, Sun combined the right
hardware and software into a product that was perfect for the market, first
scientific workstations, and then high end servers, in both cases, best of
breed, premium priced, huge moneymakers. I don't know how you get back there,
because they seem tremendously unfocused. But Apple was there once too - in
the doldrums, failing to perform, all over the map. And they came back.

~~~
13ren
It's the tide.

Digital corporation: very profitable minicomputer business... until
workstations were good enough.

Sun microsystems: very profitable workstation business... until microcomputers
were good enough.

It's hard for a business to get back to where it was, when the very basis of
its success is washed away. See "the innovator's dilemma" (actually inspired
by the Digital story). You're right though, that Apple has done it...
seemingly by shifting its weight to a different aspect of its business
(consumer design) that was present all along. IBM has also done it (from cash
registers, to mainframes, to minicomputes, to microcomputers, to today) -
however, it seems now to be consulting-based (like Accenture), which is a
different kind of business altogether, from IBM's traditional office
automation _products_ , but which was always present (like Apple).

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josefresco
"Schwartz has spent two years overhauling Sun, which posted five years of
losses under former CEO Scott McNealy. The company continues to lose market
share in servers, the computers that run corporate networks and account for
almost half of revenue."

Convenient excuse for a company that was already in trouble. This way they can
just say "oh it's the crappy economy" and hope to get a free pass for
generally sucking (see GM)

Look, if they didn't make tons of money in the last 7 years there's something
majorly wrong. I can understand if the last year was down, but the last 7
years? Please.

~~~
andr
Define sucking.

Sun is the only midlevel server company that innovates beyond buying mother
boards and CPUs and assembling them. They make their own CPUs, their own OS,
ZFS, serious storage solutions, etc. They foot the bill for MySQL and Java.And
so on and so on.

Unfortunately, bad management can sink a good technology company.

~~~
wheels
Well, but if nobody else sees value in producing their own CPUs for mid-level
servers, maybe there's a reason?

If everybody else is using a free OS for mid-level servers, maybe there's a
reason?

Java, OpenOffice and MySQL are neat. Know anybody who's paid money for them?

Sun's decisions in the technology world have been so bad in the last decade
that you could have become rich just by watching what they do and investing in
the opposite.

~~~
donw
"Everybody" is not using Linux for their mid-level servers; Solaris,
especially OpenSolaris, is still a very viable option, and offers a number of
features (most notably ZFS and Zones) that Linux isn't really close to, yet.
Not to mention, Solaris has, in my experience, a much better I/O scheduler.

Linux is a fine operating system, but it isn't the end-all-be-all.

~~~
wheels
I meant all of Sun's competitors, you know, those guys that are eating their
lunch.

The distinction here is between the quality of their product and their
understanding of their market.

------
rcoder
Isn't it strange that the same community (namely, hackers) who claim to hate
the Windows monoculture (and embrace alternative desktop platforms like
Apple's) seems intrinsically resistant to a server-side stack that isn't based
on the cheapest Intel or AMD chips they can find, running the most bog-
standard version of Red Hat or Debian.

I think it's an unfortunate sign of the times that the commoditization of
hardware is threatening to drive one of the last truly innovative hardware
vendors out of the server market.

Of course, it may all just be karma for the time when Sun workstations more or
less killed the arguably much-cooler Lisp Machines way back in the 80s.

~~~
rbanffy
Well... I am quite unlike the community you mentioned. As much as I like
Linux, I despise the PC architecture (the clunky x86 is remarkably elegant
when compared to the rest of a common PC - I imagine there is even an ISA bus
buried inside the chipset) my computers use. I would much rather have a MIPS
or ARM or SPARC based notebook instead.

Unfortunately, those are not being made mainly because any pc-class computing
device must be Windows-compatible.

There is hope. Canonical recently announced they have a complete Ubuntu stack
compiled for ARM. Maybe someone can make a cheap non-x86 usable desktop or
portable computer out of that.

As for Lisp machines, it would be very interesting to build one these days.
Anyone wants to guess what a Lisp CPU would look like if it could have been
done with, say, a 45nm process?

~~~
lallysingh
I'm no fan of x86, but the inside of these chips have kept pretty up-to-date.
Also, they're pretty fast.

PCI & the Pentium's APIC took out a lot of the old kludgey stuff of the old PC
arch.

IMHO, a removal of the older 16bit instruction set & 4 more registers would
make many of us happy. Maybe Open Firmware :-)

Disclaimer: I use a Sun x86 box on my desk, and a mac laptop. So while I'm in
x86-land, it's a distinctly different province than many others.

Anything else?

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bprater
The current economy offers every company a convenient excuse!

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crabapple
who else is astounded that sun employs more than 30k people???

~~~
gaius
Not really. Like HP and IBM, they have a big professional
services/consulting/systems integration operation.

