Demise of Sun Imminent

Demise of Sun Imminent

Posted Jun 27, 2005 23:27 UTC (Mon) by larryr (guest, #4030)
Parent article: McNealy on message (News.com)

Other than the bubble around 1999,2000,2001, when success for dotcom companies like Sun was taken for granted, it seems about 15 years now that I have been hearing that the demise of Sun is imminent: they cannot compete with Intel processor speed (eg beige-box 486 vs SPARC IPC), with Windows NT, with Linux, they have no vision, inferior/stagnant technology, dwindling customer base... yet they still have money and cash flow, their stock price is as high as it was during their first 10 years and has been steady for the last 2+ years. To me it seems like Sun has made it through a difficult period of having to compete with higher performance hardware and is heading toward a period where they will be able to offer hardware and software which performs at least as well as market competitors, in addition to continuing their tradition of good product support. It seems to me that as long as individual CPU speeds are not going up, things are looking better and better for Sun, who has for a long time been betting on the need to scale up the number of processors rather than the speed of each processor. It is not clear to me what is going to be a better option in 2-3 years for 8+ processor systems than a Sun box running Solaris. I think Scott has done a pretty good job of adapting to the industry and utilizing the resources available to him.

Larry

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