Having carefully laid the groundwork of where the industry is going wrong, he then let rip with Sun's solution to the problem. McNealy has effectively initiated a war on two fronts by announcing two software bundles that seem to go after the core business of its two main competitors in the enterprise computing space: Microsoft and IBM.
The bundles, aimed at Microsoft's desktop heartland and IBM's middleware strength, previously given the respective codenames Mad Hatter and Orion, were fleshed out and their slightly less imaginative go-to-market titles formally announced -- Java Desktop System and Java Enterprise System.
Formerly known as Mad Hatter -- a shortening of Alice in Wonderland's Mad Hatter's tea party to suggest the disparate software elements that go to make up the package -- Java Desktop System is Sun's repost to the Windows and Office bundle. Sun is obviously hoping that the momentum caused by the recent rash of viruses combined with the groundswell of support for Linux on the desktop will provide the right conditions to unseat the Redmond clan from its dominance in client software.
Set at the catchy price of $100 per desktop -- catchy that is if you happen to be a US customer, the UK will have to put up with the clunkier direct conversion of £62.40 -- the Sun Java Destop comprises Sun's StarOffice 7 open-source alternative to MS Office, a desktop environment based on Gnome, the Mozilla browser, and Ximian Evolution for email and calendaring applications.
Meanwhile, on the middleware front, and also priced at around £65 per employee, the Java Enterprise System consists of a series of products previously bundled under the Sun One moniker including directory server and a portal server as well as calendaring, Web server and messaging software.
Although Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice-president of Sun's software group, claims the bundles could net the firm around $1bn in annual revenue if the company's top 65 customers' 10 million employees bought into the software strategy, the whole focus of the push could be seen to feed back to Sun's cash cow business -- servers.
The software bundles, combined with the emphasis on reducing complexity via a utility computing model that pushes the idea of software as a service and thin clients, is a clever way of pushing companies to buy more of what Sun does best and makes most of its cash from -- servers, and the bigger the better.
When confronted about the motivation behind the software bundles, Sun's Schwartz admitted that the company is hoping that the software push will eventually feed back into its server business. "No one runs software on anything else but hardware, so as we sell more software this will create a halo effect on our hardware," he said.
Whether the software 'halo' will illuminate Sun through the dark days ahead remains to be seen. With around $5.7bn in the bank and products that range from Java smart cards to super computers, Sun's definitely not going down without a fight.
