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by James Robertson.
Original Post: What's he smoking over there?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Jonathan Schwartz continues his free fall into Wonderland, where up is down, left is right, and everyone wants Solaris. First he excoriates HP for embracing Linux (he does the same to IBM) - and then he makes this statement:
As you well know, our operating system, Solaris, continues to set land speed records on SPARC, while branching into new territory on x86 - and it's the least expensive in the industry. I continue to hear customers disappointed in the realization that ISV's don't qualify to "linux" (or specifically, Fedora) - so they have to pay big bucks for RHEL if they want commercial support. And while HP stumbles into that reality, our commitment to Solaris (did I mention we're open sourcing it - check out http://www.blastwave.org) highlights the demise of HP/UX. HP/UX won't even run on HP's own industry standard servers. As an ISV told me last week, "I come to sun, you tell me to write to Java, then write to Solaris. Clear as a bell." If you're an HP customer or ISV, have some fun, ask your HP rep the same question - "what should I write to?"
Sheesh, where do I even begin with this stuff? There's a small island out in the south pacific near Pitcairn. That's where all the people who care about Solaris on x86 live. Second, there's the whole Java problem for Sun. Here's a hint - Java (like VisualWorks) is cross platform. That means that people writing in Java don't need to care about the platform they write for. So... are they going to invest in commodity intel boxes running Linux or Windows, or are they going to invest in expensive Sun hardware? The sales figures from Sun are pretty clear about this, unless you're Whistle Boy.
Here's the thing - promoting a cross platform development language/platform has this tendency to commoditize hardware. Especially if the language/platform gets to be popular. The more Java suceeds, the less relevant Sparc/Solaris is. This has been obvious to everyone for years, with the seeming exceptions of Schwartz and McNealy. The amazing thing is that Schwartz stands there and claims that IBM and HP are in "deep trouble" - meanwhile, both of them are profitable. "Pay no attention to the falling sales behind the curtain", he says.
Yes, Sun needs a rah rah guy. What they don't need is an utterly delusional rah rah guy. Right now, Sun looks like nothing so much as a company where no one can tell McNealy and Schwartz that Java is providing wood for the termites that other companies are unleashing. The other big players are busy making money in the Java ecosystem that Sun has created - and killing Sun's business while doing so. I don't know of any new, large commitments to Sun hardware - but I know of plenty of migrations from Sun to Linux. Most of these have been enabled by the cross platform nature of Java.
Now, before someone tries to tell me that this is all bile because Java "destroyed" Smalltalk - the Smalltalk business at Cincom is growing and profitable. Heck, we are in a better place with the Smalltalk business than we've been since the downhill slide started after the PPS/Digitalk merger. Personally, I used to really like Sun's hardware and OS - both as a developer and as a sys admin (way back in the late 80's for the admin role). Right now, Sun is a train wreck in motion, aided and abetted by the utter cluelessness of people like Schwartz. Sun might have a shot at stability if he and McNealy were replaced; I see nothing but decline so long as they stick around.
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