Re: The sorry state of SUNW

From: Colin B. (cbigam_at_somewhereelse.nucleus.com)
Date: 05/19/05 

Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 20:34:21 GMT

Dan Espen <daneNO@spam.mk.telcordia.com> wrote:
>
> Despite the subject line, I still think Solaris
> is a great OS, but:
>
> 1. The famous troll Mike Cox is pretending to promote
> Solaris when he's not pretending to promote Windows.
> That can't be good.

Mike is just a sad little troll. I'm afraid that the affairs of people
who can't even manage net-kook status aren't really a fair measure of
Sun.

> 2. Sun recently announced yet another 'business alliance'
> with Microsoft. There can't be a quicker way to achieve
> bankruptcy than to team up with MS.

This one scares me too--especially that picture of Mcnealy and Ballmer
on Sun's homepage. Steve's expression looks very much like a ghoul who
has just eaten a particularly juicy human heart.

OK picture aside, I can't imagine why Sun can expect to survive a close
development partnership with Microsoft when no other company has managed
to do so in 30 years. You have to know that Microsoft wouldn't even bother
dealing closely with Sun unless they can either buy or crush them.

> 3. As a recent thread made so clear, thinking that opensourcing
> Solaris is going to help Sun, is a crackheads delusion.

I don't know about that. What I _do_ expect though, is that OpenSolaris
is going to (a) revolutionise the Unix world, (b) Drag Linux about
a hundred years forward, and (c) significantly improve the quality of
open source code. It _might_ actually increase the likelihood of getting
applications on Solaris x86, but that's a long shot.

> Sun needs to build faster, less costly Sparc hardware.
> They need Sparc hardware that is competitive on the desktop
> and in the server world. They need to keep after Adobe,
> Real Networks, and other proprietary vendors and make sure
> Sparc machines don't become irrelevant.

Right now, Sparc machines on the desktop are _already_ irrelevant.
People don't use them for word processing, people don't use them for
surfing the web, and people don't use them for playing games. Their life
on the desktop is limited to computationally intensive dedicated apps
(modelling and seismic stuff, for instance), and those people almost
invariably have a PC right beside the workstation, for everything except
their compute application. Now in that realm of hardware, you're perfectly
right--Sun needs to make faster cheaper Sparc processors, and they need to
do it soon. x86/x64 is a lost faster per dollar than Sparc, and applications
are being certified for Linux/x86 or Solaris/Sparc, with the latter waning.

Note that I'm writing this on an Ultra2, which I'm ssh'd into from my
desktop Ultra30. There are going to be a large number of people who will
use Solaris on the desktop, and will use Sparc hardware if they can. (Rich,
are you listening? :-) From a commercially viable point of view though,
Sparc desktops are dead unless Sun can completely reinvent the workstation.
(Interestingly, Bryan Cantrill hinted recently that this might be the case,
partly due to the return of Andy Bechtolsheim.)

In many ways, Sun is the last Unix company around. IBM and HP would both
barely blink if their Unices went away, DEC has been dead for ages, and
SGI has been part of the walking dead for half a decade or more. It's
getting hard to see just how a Unix company can survive, despite superior
technology. I hope they manage it.

Colin

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