I must mention that I also worked for Sun back in the 90's. Sun had some remarkable products under development at Sun Labs. I had the great fortune to work on one of them. While the product was publicly announced (and demonstrated at the Demo conference), I won't go into the details here. What killed the product/project was that it could only be sold off the shelf at places like Fry's or Circuit City, etc. Sun had no reseller market channels (at the time, anyway), and the company's sales force refused to handle anything that did not result in substantial commissions. Consequently, the product proceeded up to the manufacturing stage and then was killed. That product, along with any number of other interesting projects in the mobile embedded space at Sun Labs, could -still- be killer products. The hardware market is not dead, but Sun needs to move beyond direct sales to a channel reseller approach with some innovative hardware that leverages the software the company has developed. I'm not talking Solaris, but Java libraries and technology. These are bold moves and I don't know if Sun still has the breathing room to make a drastic change in course (unless, of course, this has been in the works and it is not publicly disclosed). Sure, this is risky, but "staying the course" is no longer an option, either.
A drastically reduced Sun could survive as a steward and support company around open source - a number of other companies are doing well enough with such a business model. I hope Sun survives, partly out of loyalty, and partly out of my belief that we always need more technology companies to keep innovation and competition alive. On Nov 21, 3:29 am, Reinier Zwitserloot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > A few things, but, some of those were under NDA and I didn't sort out > which bits have been publically released and which bits haven't. > Sorry :( > > On Nov 21, 10:06 am, "Vince O'Sullivan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Nov 20, 9:15 pm, Reinier Zwitserloot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > The point is, they aren't clinging to their sinking ship. > > > ...sun is moving away > > > from selling big iron servers... > > > Did they say what they were moving towards? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
