Sun has been bothering me for a while. Ok, since around 2000 when they bought Cobalt. Around the time of the first dot.com crash, Sun hasn't done too well in terms of stock price, yet sales have been pretty decent.
Still, Sun bothers me. What's their problem? Why the troubles? Did the stock ticker change from SUNW to JAVA really matter? And Schwartz as CEO - was that the right choice?
Then I got to thinking about the hardware business in general. Does specific hardware really matter anymore? Are we more interested in the cloud, or do big machines still matter?
Sun is where Apple was 15 years ago. The hardware is crap - lets call it a commodity. Software? Sure Solaris is nice - but wouldn't Linux or BSD also work as well? Who would really notice a change? We're talking servers, not desktops, and Linux rules the roost here. Yet Sun has some interesting software in its portfolio, which begs the question - why not split into two different companies? One hardware and the other software?
10 years ago people thought that Sun should buy Apple. Seeing where Jobs has taken Apple, we can see what a disaster that would have been. Nothing that is Apple would have happened with Sun at the helm.
Sun has a lot of potential, but the lack of direction and vision continues to hold it back.
Its kinda ironic with the name of Sun since they're been living in the shadows of giants for most of their life... Perhaps they should just chance the name of the company to JAVA too.(?)
Frankly I'm amazed that they're still around. (images of SGI come to mind)
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