
Sun CEO Jon Schwartz to Resign - alexandros
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100125/sun-ceo-set-to-announce-resignation/
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patrickgzill
While I personally liked him, I couldn't figure out their strategy, leading me
to believe that they didn't really know what they were doing.

You used to be able to buy low-end SPARC systems for $995 (v100, Blade 100)
now the cheapest system is much more than that - the same pricing strategy
that ruined SGI: as their market share declined they retreated to higher end
customers, which led to more market share declines.

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ssp
Companies that are getting eaten from below have very few options. Do you
really think Sun could have made a profit selling equipment at PC margins?
That requires an entirely different cost structure. If they had tried, you
could have written a slightly different comment:

 _Sun used to make really high-quality equipment, but now they are making
crappy PCs like everyone else - maybe they should have focused on the
customers willing to pay for quality._

Schwartz's task was essentially impossible, and selling to IBM or Oracle was
probably the best outcome he could have hoped for.

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anamax
> Companies that are getting eaten from below have very few options.

Companies die if there isn't an entry point that makes sense for customers.

It doesn't have to be at the same price point as the folks eating them from
below, but it does have to be some place where customers are willing to enter.

The mid/high-range sun systems are about as expensive as comparable PC based
systems. However, the PC systems have a low cost option for development. Suns,
not so much.

It doesn't have to cost $500, but it can't cost $10k either.

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bonaldi
Sun had pretty great entry points on 1U servers around the $1-2k mark. The
Fire X2xxx line was price-competitive and worked well with Solaris

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JunkDNA
"...leaving the company in the hands of new owner Oracle (ORCL) and its very
profit-minded leadership"

Maybe I'm reading too much into the above statement, but the point of a
company is to make profits. There are these things called "charities" for
cases when you don't want to do that.

That said, Sun's approach in recent years has certainly been a mess. They have
failed to really make open source work for them as a strategy in the same way
companies like IBM and Apple have.

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davidw
Apple's open source strategy is well defined, but not, shall we say, integral
to their company. They take what works for them, give a bit back here and
there, and mostly do proprietary, closed software and "ecosystems". In some
ways that's better than a mess (Nokia), but they're not really big open source
boosters in the way IBM are.

Sun has given a _lot_ to open source, but they don't seem to have gotten as
much back as IBM. I think once again the issue is that there wasn't a
particularly clear strategy.

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andrewljohnson
Yep, it sucks being the company that owns Java and puts open source on a
pedestal, but gets beat badly in creating the ecosystem for Java
development... i.e. Eclipse. NetBeans was never even a contender.

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kls
>Eclipse. NetBeans was never even a contender

The sad part is that it is far superior now. A friend of mine converted me 8
months ago and I am petrified that it will get lost in the shuffle now. The
thought of going back to Eclipse is mortifying after having such a consistent
experience with Netbeans.

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noarchy
I'll concur, as I've been getting quite comfy using Netbeans. If Netbeans gets
hung out to dry, it does mean going back to Eclipse (I'm not really into the
idea of buying an IDEA license).

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perneto
Actually, the new IDEA 9 now has a free, open-source version, with most of
what you'll want. There's still a commercial version with some more features
enabled.
[http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_m...](http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_matrix.html)
NetBeans' profiler is great though. IDEA doesn't have any - I use YourKit, a
3rd-party commercial profiler.

