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Story: Sun's plans...and how they could go wrong

Posted by: dukeinlondon (Friday 24 September 2004, 9:56 AM)

A very clear admittance of weakness from Sun. Sun has failed to dissociate itself from a business model where solaris allowed them to sell madly overpriced hardware. IBM and HP did the same at the time but saw the tide turn and mass produced lower margin Intel based hardware. There only problem was the total control MS had on the OS.

For them, Linux is a way out of the conundrum and a good one : they get the control they want on their specific hardware by producing the drivers and optimisition they need but they don't bear the huge cost of producing the OS.

Sun got undercut on both hardware and software ! No wonder they have it bad. Against that background, vilifying RedHat is going to be a complete waste of time. Wallstreet customers by now know they can have an OS, that can be supported by MANY companies. And that is the attraction ! If they are not happy with support from RedHat, IBM, Novell, then they can switch to another without even porting their apps ! And if they are using J2EE, then it's even transparent. They can buy big iron for monster processes and cheap boxes for files servers, all using the same technology. They can choose, they are back in control !

JPMorgan reintegrated 4000 IT staff, ending an outsourcing venture. I tell you, these guys want control, and linux, not Solaris or Windows is what can give it to them.

SUN should just do what they are good at in this context : make Linux run even better on their big irons, and concentrate on JAVA on everything else and (finally) develop a money making product offering around it.