Robert X. Cringely has been harsh to Sun over the years:
Sun did not invent the engineering workstation, but they certainly perfected it. But where are workstations today? Gone, for the most part. Sun's workstation business is about the same size as SGI's, which is to say small. Sun is now a server company, but that won't last long either under the onslaught of Linux. Cheap Intel and AMD hardware running Linux is going to kill Sun unless the company does something so stop it, which they aren't. -- http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2003/pulpit_20030213_0007...
A lot of this comes down to how companies view themselves and what they are really good at. You'll notice, for example, that I didn't include Sun in my list of vital companies. That's not so much because Sun can be defined in terms of the others but that 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. -- http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060504_0008...
Remember my doom-and-gloom prediction last week for Sun Microsystems? That's based almost entirely on the company's inability to see itself moving from being vertically integrated (doing its own proprietary hardware and software) to competing on a level (that is horizontal) playing field. While that might make them just another PC vendor, don't worry about that happening because Sun would rather die first. And will. -- http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060511_0008...
If he's right then it will be interesting to see the details unfold. If he's wrong then it will be interesting to see Sun re-invent itself.
I'm curious where Sun is heading. As far as I can tell they're running out of options. With commodity servers and free operating systems what are they going to sell? I guess for the near futures there will still be business run by people that believe an "enterprise infrastructure" means buying expensive software and hardware, but as that population ages and retires I'm curious who will continue to buy this stuff.
I see four cases where you'd be eager to deal with Sun. The first case is an integrated, one-stop-shop for SAMP [Solaris, Apache, MySQL and Python running in a JVM].
The second case is where you're in a corner and need to scale up. I wouldn't be surprised if Sun offers servers with 2048 cores. Another case is where you've got a huge volume of data on a SAN and the throughput of Solaris justifies the cost of the licenses. A final case involves the energy saving gained from RISC. However, I've previously argued this latter case ignores the opportunity cost to a fast growing organisation and is therefore irrelevant to a start-up ( https://qht.co/item?id=123587 ).
The other cases aren't important to new companies either. So, I agree with you that they're running out of options. I agree with Cringely that vertical integration isn't a big draw.
what a useless article. wow, rails rocks because it has mvc, you don't have to write sql statements and it's written in ruby!!!1! ActiveRecord is really one of the worst things about Ruby, largely due to DHH's hatred for DBMSes more complicated than MySQL 4. Also someone needs to tell him how RoR scales, heh.
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"Eric Raymond's thoughts on this topic are here; his HOWTO describes how to join "hacker culture." The culture isn't really necessary to participate in free software projects though, IMO. As long as you follow the community way-of-working you don't have to get into the social aspects (unless you'd like to)."
