Submitted by greggles on
In his weekly article Robert Cringely decided to skewer Sun Microsostems:
[...]Sun is simply doomed. Their software isn't better, their hardware isn't better, and they can't see themselves as anything but a maker of hardware or software, so my simple recommendation is that they take the rest of their cash and try entering a hot new field like -- say -- space flight. Or making really fine cakes. The world will always need fine baked goods. Or just give it back to the shareholders. Really.
Ouch. It does raise an interesting point: what do you do if a company has a hoard of cash and no growth prospects. That's a little bit of exaggeration to say "no growth prospects" but it's pretty accurate in their case ($11B in revenue last year, $107M in losses, made more money on investments than operations in 1Q06) . The value at Sun is in tangibles that have lost their value --the hardware they design is increasingly unimportant-- and intangibles that have been replaced --Java goes out for free and even after opening Solaris the OS is not compelling.
One argument is that they should invest their massive hoards of cash in new projects. That they should buy existing companies and bring them into the Sun enterprise and grow really big. From a shareholder's perspective, that's a horrible idea. If Sun is going to innovate in that way, they would be better off simply giving the money back to the individual investors and letting the individual investors decide where and how to invest the money.
So, I guess it's just time for them to sell the assets, close the doors, and send out a massive dividend. Not on McNealy's watch, for sure, but what other options do they have?
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Ian replied on Permalink
Sun
It's not just Sun that's doomed, but all the Unix's. They've squabbled and argued and fought for a ever diminishing share of the market for years, ignoring the Microsoft juggernaught, incrementally chewing away at their markets.
Now soon there will be no market. The Unix emphasis(this includes Linux), on techie geekdom is in stark contrast to the Microsoft policy of insulating users from the complexity. You can argue the toss about which is the best policy, but it's irrelevant, as it's the people who buy the software who make the decisions. Linux, having aided the destruction of the various Unix's, will be, like Apple, no be no more than an irrelevancy, "a rounding error on a pure monopoly". The tragic thing is, they could have got together and gone for the desktop market years ago, I'm sure they're combined expertise could have produced a decent GUI, but they decided to sue each other instead. They're all doomed I'm afraid, the world belongs to, well you know who.
Here's an idea. Why don't Sun or someone, get OpenLdap and Samba, combine it, put a GUI(and this is the important bit, that looks the same as Microsofts, and is as easy to use), on top of it, add the Group Policy stuff, add software distribution, RIS, and sell it for a lot less than Microsoft. You know one combined package with documentation, and then keep it up to date.
What about marketing it as cheap and robust and stable and virus proof, what about hiring some businessmen(Bill can't be the only one), what about fighting to survive, instead of living in some virtual fantasy world.
How come it took me two weeks to get a satisfactory OpenLdap, Linux/Samba set up working, from scratch, which I never really trusted, and a day to set up a Windows 2000 domain, after reading two chapters from a book.
What I mean is, go down fighting, not whining, there are things that can be done, and companies with the means to do it.