Sun announcing up to 6000 (18%) layoffs

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aq_sEpeurux8&refer=home

by andr • 18 years ago

38 31 18 years ago

josefresco• 18 years ago

"Schwartz has spent two years overhauling Sun, which posted five years of losses under former CEO Scott McNealy. The company continues to lose market share in servers, the computers that run corporate networks and account for almost half of revenue."

Convenient excuse for a company that was already in trouble. This way they can just say "oh it's the crappy economy" and hope to get a free pass for generally sucking (see GM)

Look, if they didn't make tons of money in the last 7 years there's something majorly wrong. I can understand if the last year was down, but the last 7 years? Please.

andr• 18 years ago

Define sucking.

Sun is the only midlevel server company that innovates beyond buying mother boards and CPUs and assembling them. They make their own CPUs, their own OS, ZFS, serious storage solutions, etc. They foot the bill for MySQL and Java.And so on and so on.

Unfortunately, bad management can sink a good technology company.

wheels3• 18 years ago

Well, but if nobody else sees value in producing their own CPUs for mid-level servers, maybe there's a reason?

If everybody else is using a free OS for mid-level servers, maybe there's a reason?

Java, OpenOffice and MySQL are neat. Know anybody who's paid money for them?

Sun's decisions in the technology world have been so bad in the last decade that you could have become rich just by watching what they do and investing in the opposite.

whatusername• 18 years ago

AIX and Power6 doesn't count for IBM? Surely big blue can get a little credit there..

Agreed though - I'm not really sure what HP do with Servers - more expensive than Dell, and all off-the-rack components...

jadence• 18 years ago

I'm not seeing where the excuse is in that quote. Seems like a rather honest assessment of the situation without blame on external factors.

startingup• 18 years ago

Sun's current cost structure doesn't begin to be supported by revenue. It has ~32,000 employees, and makes $12 billion in hardware revenue, with declining gross margins (Dell, Rackspace etc. are commoditizing servers). Their "strategy" for growth is open source, but after 10 years, they still haven't shown how they will make money out of Java. MySQL is a $100 million a year business, respectable, but there is no way to see how it grows to billions without pissing off and driving away the very users that made MySQL successful.

If I were them, I would cut deep, real deep, like 50% lay-off, assume further drastic erosion in their margins (and plan to be profitable with such drastic erosion), and crucially, with a slim-but-sharply-focused R&D division, focus on coming up with innovations that people are willing to pay for.

Apple did it, Sun could. It has the heart of a great company faintly ticking somewhere deep inside, but alas, current leadership hasn't shown it is up to the job.

jaaron2• 18 years ago

Again, Sun makes more money from Java than people realize. Maybe not a huge amount, but licensing the embedded and mobile JVM still brings in revenue. This is why Sun put the JVM under the GPL the way it did, so it can continue to license commercial versions of Java to handset manufacturers.

ojbyrne• 18 years ago

The comparison to Apple is apt. Back in their heyday, Sun combined the right hardware and software into a product that was perfect for the market, first scientific workstations, and then high end servers, in both cases, best of breed, premium priced, huge moneymakers. I don't know how you get back there, because they seem tremendously unfocused. But Apple was there once too - in the doldrums, failing to perform, all over the map. And they came back.

13ren• 18 years ago

It's the tide.

Digital corporation: very profitable minicomputer business... until workstations were good enough.

Sun microsystems: very profitable workstation business... until microcomputers were good enough.

It's hard for a business to get back to where it was, when the very basis of its success is washed away. See "the innovator's dilemma" (actually inspired by the Digital story). You're right though, that Apple has done it... seemingly by shifting its weight to a different aspect of its business (consumer design) that was present all along. IBM has also done it (from cash registers, to mainframes, to minicomputes, to microcomputers, to today) - however, it seems now to be consulting-based (like Accenture), which is a different kind of business altogether, from IBM's traditional office automation products, but which was always present (like Apple).

rcoder• 18 years ago

Isn't it strange that the same community (namely, hackers) who claim to hate the Windows monoculture (and embrace alternative desktop platforms like Apple's) seems intrinsically resistant to a server-side stack that isn't based on the cheapest Intel or AMD chips they can find, running the most bog-standard version of Red Hat or Debian.

I think it's an unfortunate sign of the times that the commoditization of hardware is threatening to drive one of the last truly innovative hardware vendors out of the server market.

Of course, it may all just be karma for the time when Sun workstations more or less killed the arguably much-cooler Lisp Machines way back in the 80s.

wmf• 18 years ago

Clearly it's not the monoculture that people are opposed to. And if you think it's bad now, wait for the clouds to really kick in.

rbanffy4• 18 years ago

Well... I am quite unlike the community you mentioned. As much as I like Linux, I despise the PC architecture (the clunky x86 is remarkably elegant when compared to the rest of a common PC - I imagine there is even an ISA bus buried inside the chipset) my computers use. I would much rather have a MIPS or ARM or SPARC based notebook instead.

Unfortunately, those are not being made mainly because any pc-class computing device must be Windows-compatible.

There is hope. Canonical recently announced they have a complete Ubuntu stack compiled for ARM. Maybe someone can make a cheap non-x86 usable desktop or portable computer out of that.

As for Lisp machines, it would be very interesting to build one these days. Anyone wants to guess what a Lisp CPU would look like if it could have been done with, say, a 45nm process?

lallysingh2• 18 years ago

I'm no fan of x86, but the inside of these chips have kept pretty up-to-date. Also, they're pretty fast.

PCI & the Pentium's APIC took out a lot of the old kludgey stuff of the old PC arch.

IMHO, a removal of the older 16bit instruction set & 4 more registers would make many of us happy. Maybe Open Firmware :-)

Disclaimer: I use a Sun x86 box on my desk, and a mac laptop. So while I'm in x86-land, it's a distinctly different province than many others.

Anything else?

Herring2• 18 years ago

Why is it strange? Both windows & apple are also resisting commoditization of software. (For various reasons apple more successfully than microsoft.)

sutro• 18 years ago

By what metric is "Apple more successfully resisting commoditization of software than Microsoft?" Preaching the supremacy of everything Apple to the choir of Hacker News is a good karma-building tactic, but if you want to base your claims on inconvenient truths like software revenues, you'll find that Microsoft is more successfully resisting commoditization of software than every other company on the planet. Apple isn't even in the same ballpark.

crabapple3• 18 years ago

who else is astounded that sun employs more than 30k people???

rbanffy4• 18 years ago

Well. I am.

gaius• 18 years ago

Not really. Like HP and IBM, they have a big professional services/consulting/systems integration operation.

bprater• 18 years ago

The current economy offers every company a convenient excuse!

Sun announcing up to 6000 (18%) layoffs

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