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If I was running Sun I'd seriously look at splitting the company in two. The software side is shackled by the fact that they need to move in a direction that i

by zmimon 18y ago

If I was running Sun I'd seriously look at splitting the company in two. The software side is shackled by the fact that they need to move in a direction that is going to erode revenue from the hardware side. As long as they are in the same company you will have a tug of war between two sides pulling two different ways and nobody going anywhere. I agree with the software folks trying to become the best deployment platform for web software. There's a window of opportunity while the JVM is ahead of other VMs where Sun could pull this off if they can produce a super stable, scalable, easy to deploy runtime that runs everything from PHP to Python, Ruby and Groovy and make it a snap to deploy and manage. The catch is that I don't think there's any chance they will achieve this if they try and tie it to either Solaris or Sun hardware. That ship has sailed - hosting these days is either linux or windows for all but the highest top tier. They need to completely get over it and aggressively push themselves on linux.

jwilliams 18y ago
> The software side is shackled by the fact that they need to move in a direction that is going to erode revenue from the hardware side. Unless they move into the cloud domain - in which case, their expertise in both areas (software/hardware) will be complimentary and useful.
- alexandros 18y ago
  come to think of it, sun may be the only company to have the entire stack of technologies in house... chips, servers, os, VM, programming language, development environment.. cloud computing seems an obvious direction.. perhaps they are doing that already?
  - jwilliams 18y ago
    > perhaps they are doing that already? Not really - the one piece of the puzzle that Sun doesn't really have is services (aside from support).
gaius 18y ago
But why should it be? All those environments you mention can run equally well on any operating system. If Solaris on SPARC can be made price/performance superior to Linux on Intel, then that's what they should do. It's hard to see exactly what Linux gets Sun apart from "me too" points. They don't want to be Dell.
- zmimon 18y ago
  > If Solaris on SPARC can be made price/performance superior to Linux on Intel, then that's what they should do. No - this is where I think the worlds collide. You're basically saying they should commoditize their own hardware to the point where its at parity with Intel. I'm saying they need to do the opposite - they need to increase (or at least maintain) their margins and focus on selling it to the people who really need it - enterprises and top end institutions that value the incredible robustness and scalability you can only get with that kind of hardware. I think trying to do both ends of the spectrum on the same platform is just going to ensure they do neither effectively.
  - gaius 18y ago
    Well, not necessarily. If a pair of Sun Exxx's in a cluster was cheaper, faster and more reliable than a rack or two's worth of 1U Dells then it would be a no-brainer. Right now, for most applications, AMD64 beats SPARC. I would love to run Solaris on AMD in production. I can't tho' because Solaris x86 doesn't get tier-1 support from a couple of vendors I rely on. The choices are SPARC/Solaris or Intel/Redhat, and despite the fact that Red Hat is a complete pain in the arse, I can't justify SPARC/Solaris on grounds of better manageability and I can't do AMD/Solaris either. That is where Sun could make some quick wins.

by zmimon 18y ago

jwilliams 18y ago

> The software side is shackled by the fact that they need to move in a direction that is going to erode revenue from the hardware side. Unless they move into the cloud domain - in which case, their expertise in both areas (software/hardware) will be complimentary and useful.

alexandros 18y ago
come to think of it, sun may be the only company to have the entire stack of technologies in house... chips, servers, os, VM, programming language, development environment.. cloud computing seems an obvious direction.. perhaps they are doing that already?
- jwilliams 18y ago
  > perhaps they are doing that already? Not really - the one piece of the puzzle that Sun doesn't really have is services (aside from support).

gaius 18y ago

But why should it be? All those environments you mention can run equally well on any operating system. If Solaris on SPARC can be made price/performance superior to Linux on Intel, then that's what they should do. It's hard to see exactly what Linux gets Sun apart from "me too" points. They don't want to be Dell.

zmimon 18y ago
> If Solaris on SPARC can be made price/performance superior to Linux on Intel, then that's what they should do. No - this is where I think the worlds collide. You're basically saying they should commoditize their own hardware to the point where its at parity with Intel. I'm saying they need to do the opposite - they need to increase (or at least maintain) their margins and focus on selling it to the people who really need it - enterprises and top end institutions that value the incredible robustness and scalability you can only get with that kind of hardware. I think trying to do both ends of the spectrum on the same platform is just going to ensure they do neither effectively.
- gaius 18y ago
  Well, not necessarily. If a pair of Sun Exxx's in a cluster was cheaper, faster and more reliable than a rack or two's worth of 1U Dells then it would be a no-brainer. Right now, for most applications, AMD64 beats SPARC. I would love to run Solaris on AMD in production. I can't tho' because Solaris x86 doesn't get tier-1 support from a couple of vendors I rely on. The choices are SPARC/Solaris or Intel/Redhat, and despite the fact that Red Hat is a complete pain in the arse, I can't justify SPARC/Solaris on grounds of better manageability and I can't do AMD/Solaris either. That is where Sun could make some quick wins.