
Shrinking Sun under the gun - nickb
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/10/sun_under_gun/
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patrickg-zill
Sun has some aspects of their business, that are like a Web 2.0 company.

For instance, Solaris and OpenSolaris are given away free (Sun will even send
you a free CD of OpenSolaris), so there are some number of Solaris users - but
how much are they worth? How do you "monetize" them?

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Tamerlin
They started heading down that road when they developed Java... because when
the rest of the industry outpaced Sun's hardware performance, Java made it
easier to get their software off of Sun's platform. And the didn't really do
all that good a job of monetizing Java, maybe because they thought that it
would make it easier for people to develop on their PC's and migrate to Sun
servers?

BTW, as an aside, it seems to me that MS is to some extent following that
route; there have been an increasing number of projects using various dotNET
technologies cropping up in the open-source community over the years. Unless
the trend has changed in the last year or so, most of them have been based on
Mono rather than MS' implementation.

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mattculbreth
I think an Apple purchase would be cool. Lay off just about everyone at Sun
that's not directly related to Solaris or the engineering on the boxes, and
then make it Apple's Enterprise brand. Probably the worst idea in the history
of commerce, but I like it.

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patrickg-zill
They could call the combined company Snapple.

