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.
"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.
I'd expect most of that is going to be for more senior staff, who you probably do not deserve it... you know, the ones with the kind of salaries that should be illegal - because they drive greedy, crappy employees into the top positions consistently.
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 ;)
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
