The Sun is Setting…
After computer maker Sun Microsystems admitted to a $34 million loss yesterday, investors could hardly wait to start the sell-off, with shares opening down and eventually closing at $12.64 — dipping as low as $12.37, well below half the the 52 week high and twenty percent in less than 24 hours. Prompting an unnamed reporter who covers Sun to let us steal the headline they’d never be allowed to run. While the company does promise to slash 2,500 employees from its payroll, the board may want to look at executive pay as well — CEO Jonathan Schwartz made Forbes’ list of the twelve best-paid tech CEOs at $13.5 million.
This just proves to me that a strategy of selling over priced hardware, with an Operating System nobody wants, while giving away your software just isn’t going to make any kind of money. Sun can’t survive the open source onslaught. If they want to be part of the solution they need to figure out how to monazite it, however I am not even sure they have the best technology.
For example, they have already taken Seebeyond and diluted it with the Glassfish project. I know many users of the JCAPS toolset are asking themselves where this thing is going? We, for example just installed JCAPS on the sun application server rather then the native Seebeyond server due to Glassfish but with little to no guidance from Sun.
On the server size, the Niagara / Rock technology continues to confuse customers. We for example had a sun sales person tell us that Niagara was an excellent choice for running web servers, but they didn’t recommend it for the JCAPS tool set when it was used for EDI? Huh, so what should we buy to run this then? The answer, SPARC or Intel/AMD.
Let’s just hope when this all ends that Glassfish and MySQL survive to live another day as useable Open Source technologies.
