Sun is Hurting $$$

[Marc Peabody]

Sun is losing money.

Looks like they took a huge hit this quarter. Kinda sad.

[marc weber]

They were holding steady in the 15-20 range for a long time, but the last year has been a definite decline.

Hmmm... This coincides almost exactly with changing their ticker symbol from "SUNW" to "JAVA."

[Pat Farrell]

Not a lot of news here. Sun hasn't made a lot of sense in years. From the linked story:

Sun's strategy of developing free, "open-source" software and giving it away to spur sales of its high-end computer servers and support services hasn't paid off as investors would like

They gonna make it up on volume?

When a quad processor system sells for $600, the squeeze from the bottom is intense. And IBM is not about to let go of the top of the market.

IMHO, there is no future for Sun

[Oscar Johansson]

I feel they will be acquired sooner or later at this rate.

As much as I love their contributions to open source and developers in general, I wonder that will happen to all the tools and projects they support currently.

[Pat Farrell]

Originally posted by Onkar Joshi:
I wonder that will happen to all the tools and projects they support currently.

Clearly that depends on who buys the assets. Unless its IBM, I expect that paid corporate support (engineers who work on it on company time) will go down.

I have never seen any attraction in OpenSolaris.

I use Netbeans, Java, and MySql every day. But I never understood why Sun paid big bucks for MySql.

My personal bet is that Netbeans will move to a much slower development pace, as Sun has been pumping a fair amount of money into it, and I don't see what they get out of it. And recent releases have been as much about other langauges as Java

[Arvind Mahendra]

Sun should probably get Bill Gates as director on its board.

[Marc Peabody]

Originally posted by Pat Farrell:
They gonna make it up on volume?

I believe there's quite a market for support on open source products. Unfortunately for Sun, I think the open source products that work with this model are usually bleeding edge and sparsely documented.
[ October 21, 2008: Message edited by: Marc Peabody ]

[Marc Peabody]

Originally posted by marc weber:
They were holding steady in the 15-20 range for a long time, but the last year has been a definite decline.

A friend of mine used to buy it when it was below 15 and sell when it was above. He said it transitioned about every 6 months and he made some pretty good money with that strategy... though I'm not sure the profits offset his last attempt of catching the wave.

[Oscar Johansson]

Originally posted by Arvind Mahendra:
Sun should probably get Bill Gates as director on its board.

He might actually agree. After charity is what he wants to do. And charity is what many believe Sun does with open source.

That it could hurt his own holding in MS is a different issue... :roll:

[Abhinav Srivastava]

If Sun goes down (and I don't mean sunset :-) ) you think Java adoption could take a big hit?

[Joe San]

Nope. Totally disagree...

[Peter Rooke]

This is quite old - just in case anyone missed it the first time around:

http://www.theserverside.com/tt/cartoons/GatesMcNealy2/GatesMcNealy2.gif

[marc weber]

Ouch: NYT - Sun Microsystems Reports $1.7 Billion Loss and Falling Sales

[Marc Peabody]

They're trying to turn things around:

Sun cuts up to 6,000 jobs

[Pat Farrell]

Originally posted by Marc Peabody:
I believe there's quite a market for support on open source products.

That was not the Sun model. it was MySql AB's model. Sun's model was to give away tools and have folks buy their very expensive hardware. And some of their hardware is still very cool. They have a 4U rack of RAID that holds like 48 Terabytes.

There is no margin in hardware anymore.

[Ulf Dittmer]

Not to worry, Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz has a new plan.