7 ms·

TBray Response: Sun Should Stop Sucking

39 points by soundsop 18y ago

cpr 18y ago
Sun is just a bunch of really smart developers surrounded by a bunch of fairly bozo sales and marketing folks, and headed by no one with a real vision. They might as well give up. "Without a vision, the people perish." (quoting scripture) Sad, too, as I remember the early Sun quite well (at the 10-15 people phase), as they were a neighbor of ours in Mountain View, and we (Imagen, later QMS) swapped early laser printers for early Sun workstations.
- gjm11 18y ago
  Misquoting a mistranslation of scripture, unfortunately. (The actual proverb seems to mean something like "without prophecy, the people cast off restraint", which is both less poetic and less sensible.)
greyman 18y ago
Sensible response.
- jwilliams 18y ago
  Is it? The rebuttals don't seem to align at all with Tim's statements... And the "What Sun Could Do" seems to boil down to: sell more hardware and storage... Doesn't seems like a killer strategy to me.
  - Retric 18y ago
    Sell more hardware, stop wasting money, and keep your customers happy.
  - gjm11 18y ago
    Maybe they don't have a "killer strategy". They've been struggling for quite a while. It seems pretty plausible that the best they can hope for, for now, is a "survival strategy".
Tichy 18y ago
I wonder if the high prices are something we "normal" guys simply can not understand. Maybe they just trigger the "reassuringly expensive" button at companies that don't care about money. Or there are some complicated tax evasion schemes or whatnot at work, that make it mandatory to waste some money. I've witnessed it for years in the Java world where every application had to run on Bea Weblogic and Oracle, when Open Source applications would have been available and actually were more suitable to the task. Also, it seems to work for Apple...
- nradov 18y ago
  From a marketing standpoint, setting your product prices much higher than the competition is one way to signal customers that your product is superior. But this tends to be more effective with consumer luxury products where buying decisions are based most highly on emotion and desire for exclusivity.
- bretthoerner 18y ago
  > Maybe they just trigger the "reassuringly expensive" button at companies that don't care about money. Maybe in the past, but do you think they're going to find a lot of companies that don't care about money in the near future?
  - Tichy 18y ago
    I think there will always be companies with too much money. It wouldn't be my preferred strategy, but still... Among other things, don't they say it is easier to raise a lot of money than just a little bit of money from VCs? So if you business plan lists 10 Sun servers instead of 10 cheap Linux servers, you already increased the money at stake by a large margin (I presume).
- jimbokun 18y ago
  "Also, it seems to work for Apple..." I see irony here, in that I'm old enough to remember when Sun was killing because everyone needed high end server hardware to get on the web and so Sun could charge a good premium, and Apple was getting killed because they were trying to sell a premium product into a market that had been commoditized by the PC. Interesting how things change. I'm not sure what the equivalent of the "Apple strategy" would be for re-establishing a premium brand in the server space.
cabalamat 18y ago
Sun want to sell servers. They can either become a commodity box-shifter on razor thin margins, or they can make their products better so customers want to pay a premium. To make their boxes better, they'd have to come with pre-installed server software, all the normal stuff you'd see on a web server, and tightly integrate the OS / file system / database so that (e.g.) MySQL is running very fast. Kirk Wylie is right that no-one cares anbout Solaris anymore. If they'd open sourced it ten years ago, things might be different. But today, Linux is king on servers. I use Ubuntu on the desktop; I use it on the server too out of convenience -- I know that i can install new package on both systems in exactly the same way using apt-get, I know that the diorectory structure is the same, I know that I can test a feature on my desktop then port it to the server without getting wierd incompatibility problems. The only way I'd consider using Solaris is if it worked exactly like Ubuntu, i.e. make the Solaris kernel a plug-in replacement for the Linux kernel in the Ubuntu distro. Fortunately, such a thing exists: http://foss-boss.blogspot.com/2008/11/nexenta-can-you-say-solabuntu-part1.html http://foss-boss.blogspot.com/2008/11/nexenta-can-you-say-so... Then, in order to be a one-stop shop, Sun should get into the hosting business, setting up datacenters around the world running their hardware/software solution. They could even do a system that automatically mirrored a web server at different locations around the world to make it more resilient.
- gaius 18y ago
  Server != web server. I think that's something that a lot of "Linux has won" people miss.
  - bbgm 18y ago
    In the scientific computing world, the move away from Solaris was swift and comprehensive. It's not a question of what's better, but of what gives you the best bang for the buck at an acceptable level and Linux has more than delivered that.
- briansmith 18y ago
  On servers, Solaris is better than Linux. DTrace, ZFS, Zones, resource management framework, RBAC, service management framework, among other things, are all better. Solaris already has most of the Linux userland available. A lot of it is even installed by default; it just isn't in the default PATH. If you change your default path, you can get access to a lot of the inferior Linux tools that you are used to. Yum and apt-get are better at patching and package installation than Solaris tools. However, the experience on Solaris isn't so bad that the whole OS has to be thrown away because if it. Besides, when IPS is released Solaris's package management will be better than both Yum and apt-get.
sahaj 18y ago
everyone keeps talking about what sun should or should not do. no one talks about how they will actually do any of it. sun is barely surviving; they don't have the money to do much.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
Tekhne 18y ago
There seems to be some Sun-focused FUD and Linux-focused fanboyism flying around here and on Kirk's blog. Obviously, that's no way to evaluate competing solutions. We need facts. We need apple to apple comparisons of hardware and operating systems, where we can get them. Of course, every /serious/ business can and should get into the details, but for the sake of argument, I invite you to compare a couple apples from the barrel: Sun Microsystem's Sun Fire X4150 (used by Kirk's site), and Dell's PowerEdge 1950 III. They support /very/ similar hardware options (rack units, CPUs, memory, network, internal storage, out-of-band management, power, expansion slots, etc.), have roughly the same price depending on options (~$7500), and run roughly the same major software (Linux, Solaris, VMWare). Based on that one example, I don't see how Kirk justifies decrying Sun. I could go on with more hardware or a light comparison of Solaris vs. Linux, but you get the point. Stop with the hyperbole and try presenting facts in a digestible format.
- tptacek 18y ago
  After pointing out that the author of the article is too biased in favor of Linux to do an honest comparison, you then base your substantive critique on the argument that Sun hardware really isn't more expensive than the X86 hardware web shops use to do the same job. My question is, do you actually believe that?
known 18y ago
I think Sun should offer Sparc chips at half the price of Intel chips.

39 points by soundsop 18y ago

cpr 18y ago

Sun is just a bunch of really smart developers surrounded by a bunch of fairly bozo sales and marketing folks, and headed by no one with a real vision. They might as well give up. "Without a vision, the people perish." (quoting scripture) Sad, too, as I remember the early Sun quite well (at the 10-15 people phase), as they were a neighbor of ours in Mountain View, and we (Imagen, later QMS) swapped early laser printers for early Sun workstations.

gjm11 18y ago
Misquoting a mistranslation of scripture, unfortunately. (The actual proverb seems to mean something like "without prophecy, the people cast off restraint", which is both less poetic and less sensible.)

greyman 18y ago

Sensible response.

jwilliams 18y ago
Is it? The rebuttals don't seem to align at all with Tim's statements... And the "What Sun Could Do" seems to boil down to: sell more hardware and storage... Doesn't seems like a killer strategy to me.
- Retric 18y ago
  Sell more hardware, stop wasting money, and keep your customers happy.
- gjm11 18y ago
  Maybe they don't have a "killer strategy". They've been struggling for quite a while. It seems pretty plausible that the best they can hope for, for now, is a "survival strategy".

Tichy 18y ago

I wonder if the high prices are something we "normal" guys simply can not understand. Maybe they just trigger the "reassuringly expensive" button at companies that don't care about money. Or there are some complicated tax evasion schemes or whatnot at work, that make it mandatory to waste some money. I've witnessed it for years in the Java world where every application had to run on Bea Weblogic and Oracle, when Open Source applications would have been available and actually were more suitable to the task. Also, it seems to work for Apple...

nradov 18y ago
From a marketing standpoint, setting your product prices much higher than the competition is one way to signal customers that your product is superior. But this tends to be more effective with consumer luxury products where buying decisions are based most highly on emotion and desire for exclusivity.
bretthoerner 18y ago
> Maybe they just trigger the "reassuringly expensive" button at companies that don't care about money. Maybe in the past, but do you think they're going to find a lot of companies that don't care about money in the near future?
- Tichy 18y ago
  I think there will always be companies with too much money. It wouldn't be my preferred strategy, but still... Among other things, don't they say it is easier to raise a lot of money than just a little bit of money from VCs? So if you business plan lists 10 Sun servers instead of 10 cheap Linux servers, you already increased the money at stake by a large margin (I presume).
jimbokun 18y ago
"Also, it seems to work for Apple..." I see irony here, in that I'm old enough to remember when Sun was killing because everyone needed high end server hardware to get on the web and so Sun could charge a good premium, and Apple was getting killed because they were trying to sell a premium product into a market that had been commoditized by the PC. Interesting how things change. I'm not sure what the equivalent of the "Apple strategy" would be for re-establishing a premium brand in the server space.

cabalamat 18y ago

Sun want to sell servers. They can either become a commodity box-shifter on razor thin margins, or they can make their products better so customers want to pay a premium. To make their boxes better, they'd have to come with pre-installed server software, all the normal stuff you'd see on a web server, and tightly integrate the OS / file system / database so that (e.g.) MySQL is running very fast. Kirk Wylie is right that no-one cares anbout Solaris anymore. If they'd open sourced it ten years ago, things might be different. But today, Linux is king on servers. I use Ubuntu on the desktop; I use it on the server too out of convenience -- I know that i can install new package on both systems in exactly the same way using apt-get, I know that the diorectory structure is the same, I know that I can test a feature on my desktop then port it to the server without getting wierd incompatibility problems. The only way I'd consider using Solaris is if it worked exactly like Ubuntu, i.e. make the Solaris kernel a plug-in replacement for the Linux kernel in the Ubuntu distro. Fortunately, such a thing exists: http://foss-boss.blogspot.com/2008/11/nexenta-can-you-say-solabuntu-part1.html http://foss-boss.blogspot.com/2008/11/nexenta-can-you-say-so... Then, in order to be a one-stop shop, Sun should get into the hosting business, setting up datacenters around the world running their hardware/software solution. They could even do a system that automatically mirrored a web server at different locations around the world to make it more resilient.

gaius 18y ago
Server != web server. I think that's something that a lot of "Linux has won" people miss.
- bbgm 18y ago
  In the scientific computing world, the move away from Solaris was swift and comprehensive. It's not a question of what's better, but of what gives you the best bang for the buck at an acceptable level and Linux has more than delivered that.
briansmith 18y ago
On servers, Solaris is better than Linux. DTrace, ZFS, Zones, resource management framework, RBAC, service management framework, among other things, are all better. Solaris already has most of the Linux userland available. A lot of it is even installed by default; it just isn't in the default PATH. If you change your default path, you can get access to a lot of the inferior Linux tools that you are used to. Yum and apt-get are better at patching and package installation than Solaris tools. However, the experience on Solaris isn't so bad that the whole OS has to be thrown away because if it. Besides, when IPS is released Solaris's package management will be better than both Yum and apt-get.

sahaj 18y ago

everyone keeps talking about what sun should or should not do. no one talks about how they will actually do any of it. sun is barely surviving; they don't have the money to do much.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

Tekhne 18y ago

There seems to be some Sun-focused FUD and Linux-focused fanboyism flying around here and on Kirk's blog. Obviously, that's no way to evaluate competing solutions. We need facts. We need apple to apple comparisons of hardware and operating systems, where we can get them. Of course, every /serious/ business can and should get into the details, but for the sake of argument, I invite you to compare a couple apples from the barrel: Sun Microsystem's Sun Fire X4150 (used by Kirk's site), and Dell's PowerEdge 1950 III. They support /very/ similar hardware options (rack units, CPUs, memory, network, internal storage, out-of-band management, power, expansion slots, etc.), have roughly the same price depending on options (~$7500), and run roughly the same major software (Linux, Solaris, VMWare). Based on that one example, I don't see how Kirk justifies decrying Sun. I could go on with more hardware or a light comparison of Solaris vs. Linux, but you get the point. Stop with the hyperbole and try presenting facts in a digestible format.

tptacek 18y ago
After pointing out that the author of the article is too biased in favor of Linux to do an honest comparison, you then base your substantive critique on the argument that Sun hardware really isn't more expensive than the X86 hardware web shops use to do the same job. My question is, do you actually believe that?

known 18y ago

I think Sun should offer Sparc chips at half the price of Intel chips.