sun

What is wrong with Sun?

Posted by Cameron Stokes on November 28, 2008
geek, random, rant, sun / No Comments

I’ve had a geek crush on Sun Microsystems for several years now. Sometimes I find myself just browsing the Servers section of their website configuring different servers and imagining what I would do with ridiculous mounts of CPU power or storage. They make many cool products and technologies that continue to fascinated me:

  • UltraSPARC T2 Processors – Highly scalable, energy efficient processors with Chip-Level Multithreading (CMT).
  • Unified Storage Systems – Storage systems that scale up to 576 TB.
  • Enterprise Class Servers – Systems that scale to 256 CPU cores and 2 TB of ram.
  • Modular Blade Systems – Blade systems capable of running SPARC, AMD, and Intel blades all in one blade chassis.
  • Sun Rays – True thin clients providing low cost, low footprint virtual display clients.
  • OpenSolaris – An open source operating system proving to be a serious contender to Linux.
  • DTrace – An open source dynamic tracing application giving insight into any running process with little overhead.
  • ZFS – An open source “next generation” filesystem.
  • Java – An open source, machine independent development platform.
  • GlassFish – An open source Java application server.

Given all this, I am amazed at how poorly they do quarter after quarter, year after year.  They bring in over $10 billion a year in revenue but make marginal income and little to no profit.  I don’t see HP, Dell, IBM, or even Microsoft innovating in all these areas yet they’re all making money.  So…what is wrong with Sun?

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