You (James Mansion) wrote:
> Simon Phipps wrote:
>>> Ths thing I find interesting in the article, and indeed in many of your
>>> statements, is that you show absolutely no sign of self-doubt about
>>> whether open sourcing everything you could actually destroyed shareholder
>>> value and drove Sun down the toilet.
>>
>> That's because it did not. See the penultimate paragraph of
>> http://webmink.com/2010/03/08/sundown/
>>
>>
> I don't understand. I'm looking at 'we've achieved some amazing things ...
> despite the success of Sun's open source business, it still wasn't enough
> to rescue Sun'.
>
> That looks self-congratulatory to me, not doubting. I'm not sure how the
> open sourcing was successful for Sun shareholders. Definitely successful
> for Red Hat shareholders though. Where's the bit that says 'maybe
> embracing open source was a huge mistake and we screwed up'? Its one thing
> to embrace open source by consuming it, but embracing it by taking a huge
> IP investment and chucking over the wall? (Well, mostly ...)
>
> The whole strategy seems to have been predicated on 'the enemy of my enemy
> is my friend', presumably based on a massive chip-on-shoulder brought about
> by NT eating your market in CAD and financial workstations.
>
> Hopefully Larry's management team will see that there IS some market for a
> not-Windows alternative for PC-clone workstations and that the consistency,
> stability of interfaces and compatibility that defined Solaris are a
> differentiator that can make it more attractive to OEMs than Linux
> variants. But I'm not hopeful.
>
> James
James,
if you look at Sun's annual earnings documents, you might notice, that most of
Sun's revenue and especially margin was generated by big iron hardware.
And the money coming in from software was mostly licebnses to OEMs (think
Java), as far as those numbers have ever been published. So, I'm a bit
interpreting stuff here.
Sun has never been in the end-user-market, and has never been able to sell
small-money items to many people (no online-shop, et.al.). Therefore the idea
to opensource the software has never been intended to create additional
revenue from it, but to generate mind-share with the developer community, so
that in FUTURE more ISVs, or big software-companies or even smaller mid-market
software companies would again prefer Solaris as the basis for their
apps. And, yes, that worked! Not in the way many hoped it would, but yes, it
generated more mind-share, and with that additional HW-sales.
Sun lost the "movement" when it started selling E10K's and relied on that
success and as a successor to that partially neglected the Universities and
their IT-departments. That's, when the mind-share drifted to Linux, despite
its weaknesses and faults.
So, Oracle now is the second biggest SW-company of the world, they KNOW how to
monetize SW, and I hope and am sure, we will see some big monetizations coming
out of the assest that Oracle got with the acquisition of Sun. And that in
turn will again allow to let OpenSolaris live as well as Java. Larry stated it
cleary: "It's not needed to produce margin or revenue directly, as long as it
helps generate revenue and margin over-all!"
Matthias
--
Matthias Pfützner | Tel.: +49 700 PFUETZNER | Die Phantasie ist die
Lichtenbergstr.73 | mailto:[email protected] | wichtigste erogene Zone.
D-64289 Darmstadt | AIM: pfuetz, ICQ: 300967487 |
Germany | http://www.pfuetzner.de/matthias/ | Federico Fellini
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