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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Rinse, repeat
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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I see that Tech Republic is reporting that Sun's latest round of layoffs has grown to 3600 people. Sun is a fascinating company. I like their OS (Solaris), and, back when I worked on their hardware regularly, I liked their boxes. Somewhere during the dotCom boom, Sun really, really lost its way.
The first problem is that they seem to believe their own marketing materials too much - they still seem to think that Java is a net postive money maker for them - note to Jonathan Schwartz - all those Java enabled handsets you are so proud of? They don't represent positive net revenue to Sun. I had friends come back from JavaOne last year who were incredulous that Sun was pushing the notion of Java games as a business opportunity. They jumped on the Linux on intel bandwagon way, way too late - their low end is being eaten alive by Dell, and IBM still pounds them on the high end. That might have something to do with costs on the low end, and IBM's ability to milk revenues off of Java on the high end (WebSphere, anyone?). Meanwhile, Sun gives away the software they could charge for (application servers), and sells the stuff that goes head to head with Office (StarOffice).
The thing is, I've seen this business plan before, only with far smaller piles of money to throw away - the whole PPD/OBJS nightmare was a lot like it - the same executive cluelessness, the same lack of engineering direction, and the same lack of decent oversight by the board of directors. Just as a sane board would have given Bill Lyons the boot sometime in 1996 (when things could potentially have been turned around), a sane Sun board would have cleaned house a few years ago, after watching the fruitless years of attacks on Microsoft. Instead, they seem to be watching a repeat performance, only without the dotCom bubble to support it.
They've learned nothing; their marketing is still all attack based, only the target has changed. Heck, I think they might be taking some of the anti-MS screeds from the late 90's and republishing them after a global copy/replace operation - IBM in, Microsoft out. Have a look at this note from Schwartz, for instance. Yeah, if I were IBM I'd be quaking in my boots over that. At least when I take aim, it's in pursuit of a target I might actually be able to hit.
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