Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking

Collarspace Discussion Forums

Home Login Search

Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking

View related threads: (in this forum | in all forums)

Logged in as: Guest

All Forums >> [Casual Banter] >> Off the Grid >> Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking

Page: [1]

Message

<< Older Topic Newer Topic >>

Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking - 11/21/2008 1:36:00 PM

Vendaval

Posts: 10297
Joined: 1/15/2005
Status: offline

I just read a very interesting article on another segment of the US economy needing to re-arrange and re-think priorities during the economic depression. The company in question is Sun Microsystems, once a leader in the High Tech Industry. The writer suggestions a re-structuring that does not require a tax-payer funded bailout or filing bankruptcy.

"The Poster Child for Dead Companies Walking?"

Silicon Insider: We Shouldn't Prop Up Dying, Older Firms Like Sun Microsystems
COLUMN By MICHAEL S. MALONE
Nov. 21, 2008, 2008
"Sun Microsystems is just the high-tech poster child for dead-man-walking corporations. Our economy is littered with them (though, happily, they probably number far fewer than in Europe), and they exert a tremendous, though rarely recognized, drag on our economy.

And that drag becomes even greater when we try to save them -- or worse, bail them out. Surely there is a better way to put obsolete companies out of business rather than slowly wither away, tying up financial, intellectual and labor capital for years in the process.

Perhaps what we need is some kind of formal liquidation event -- think of it as assisted suicide for companies in extremis -- by which they can easily distribute their assets to all stakeholders, shut their doors and hold a big, drunken "gone out of business" party. Then, those assets could be recirculated back into the economy to, in part, serve as investment capital for new start-up companies -- just as the employees would be returned to the labor pool, many of them bringing their experience to help run those start-ups."

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/SmallBiz/Story?id=6300031&page=1

_____________________________

"Beware, the woods at night, beware the lunar light.
So in this gray haze we'll be meating again, and on that
great day, I will tease you all the same."
"WOLF MOON", OCTOBER RUST, TYPE O NEGATIVE

http://KinkMeet.co.uk

Profile

Post #: 1

RE: Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking - 11/21/2008 2:43:18 PM

DomKen

Posts: 19457
Joined: 7/4/2004
From: Chicago, IL
Status: offline

For those in the field this was obviously coming. A company cannot put so much effort into product that they give away and stay financially healthy. Perhaps this will put a final stake in the corpse of the "free software as business model" stuff that has been being pushed by certain elements of the software industry for the last decade or so.

(in reply to Vendaval)

Profile

Post #: 2

RE: Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking - 11/21/2008 5:24:28 PM

celticlord2112

Posts: 5732
Status: offline

quote:

Perhaps this will put a final stake in the corpse of the "free software as business model" stuff that has been being pushed by certain elements of the software industry for the last decade or so.

Hardly, since those same elements are the ones that have ravaged Sun the most.

_____________________________

(in reply to DomKen)

Profile

Post #: 3

RE: Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking - 11/21/2008 5:35:32 PM

thornhappy

Posts: 8596
Joined: 12/16/2006
Status: offline

Wow, I never heard that Solaris was free...and I know a lot of folks who used to depend on proprietary, expensive systems that now run cheap Linux clusters.

thornhappy

(in reply to celticlord2112)

Profile

Post #: 4

RE: Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking - 11/21/2008 5:41:54 PM

DarkSteven

Posts: 28072
Joined: 5/2/2008
Status: offline

Unfair, since Sun has not asked for a bailout.They're shedding jobs and refocusing, exactly what a company should do.

thornhappy, they spent a lot of money pushing an alternative to MS Office, variously called Star Office or Open Office.

_____________________________

"You women....

The small-breasted ones want larger breasts. The large-breasted ones want smaller ones. The straight-haired ones curl their hair, and the curly-haired ones straighten theirs...

Quit fretting. We men love you."

(in reply to thornhappy)

Profile

Post #: 5

RE: Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking - 11/21/2008 5:47:42 PM

thornhappy

Posts: 8596
Joined: 12/16/2006
Status: offline

Ah, for some reason I was thinking those apps were for Linux machines; I didn't think they ran on Windows machines.

Michael Malone's one of my favorite authors, and I really miss the stuff he did on KTEH. He also wrote a really good book on the history of Apple (Infinite Loop: How Apple, The World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane).

thornhappy

(in reply to DarkSteven)

Profile

Post #: 6

RE: Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking - 11/21/2008 10:09:11 PM

DomKen

Posts: 19457
Joined: 7/4/2004
From: Chicago, IL
Status: offline

quote:

ORIGINAL: thornhappy

Wow, I never heard that Solaris was free...and I know a lot of folks who used to depend on proprietary, expensive systems that now run cheap Linux clusters.

thornhappy

At least some versions of solaris have been free for the last 8 to 10 years.

(in reply to thornhappy)

Profile

Post #: 7

RE: Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking - 11/22/2008 1:35:46 AM

Aquilifer

Posts: 31
Joined: 4/19/2005
Status: offline

quote:

ORIGINAL: celticlord2112

quote:

Perhaps this will put a final stake in the corpse of the "free software as business model" stuff that has been being pushed by certain elements of the software industry for the last decade or so.

Hardly, since those same elements are the ones that have ravaged Sun the most.

You are both wrong.

Sun is not in the operating system business.

They tried their hand at this for 10 years plus, but it never did make them money. Given that the SPARC port of Solaris has always been far more robust than the x86 port (which they almost abandoned 10 years ago), this is a little like Nvidia or Radeon trying to make money selling the drivers for their video cards. They don't try to; they give their drivers away for free. Closed source, but free.

Sun is in the hardware business.

They've been losing money because their hardware has a higher price point than comparable generic x86 hardware. 10 or 15 years ago, this wasn't as important because

Intel iron didn't run OSes more robust than NT, which was crap.
Intel gear was far less reliable than Sun gear.
The dotcom boom had not yet gone bust and IT departments were flush.

None of these things are now true.

W2K3 and/or W2K8 and/or WXP is the MS OS of choice, while some flavor of Linux is the Unix OS variant of choice. All of these are at or reasonably close to the reliability level of Solaris. None scales nearly as well in massive SMP environments, but nobody is producing 128-core CPUs yet, either.
High end Intel iron has been catching up on the reliability side, slowly but decidedly, since 2000.
Money for IT department has been tight since the tech crash and the current recession will only worsen that trend.

I know whereof I speak. I used to build and administer Solaris systems for a living, before I got into information security.

(in reply to celticlord2112)

Profile

Post #: 8

RE: Sun Microsystems, Dead Company Walking - 11/22/2008 6:45:38 AM

DomKen

Posts: 19457
Joined: 7/4/2004
From: Chicago, IL
Status: offline

Maybe that's how you perceive things but Sun has been mostly a software business for a long time now. They saw the writing on the wall for high end Unix boxes and tried to diversify. Unfortunately for the whole industry they got mixed up in the anti MS free software crowd and devoted significant resources to stuff like OpenOffice with no way to ever make any money from it.

The fact is that Java is a major player in the market place and losing Sun will result in it becoming an exclusively volunteer effort and likely leave it wandering in the wildreness for years much like Navigator did in the multiyear period when it was transformed into Mozilla, which didn't really succeed until people started getting paid to work on it again.

(in reply to Aquilifer)

Profile

Post #: 9