Sun radically changes Linux Mantra

Sun Microsystems Inc. listened to its customers' demands and offered Linux support on its products, said Sun CEO Scott McNealy during the opening keynote at the mid-September SunNetwork conference in San Francisco, California, USA.

But now that Solaris for Intel Corporation's x86 platform is available, Le Roi Soleil added two days later, there's no good reason to buy Linux for the enterprise.

Indeed, he said, Linux is a "great environment for the hobbyist" but not for corporate IT shops. McNealy kicked off SunNetwork on 16 September by touting Sun's support for Linux. "We were told [by customers] to do Linux, so we did," he said. "We have got SuSE and Red Hat on the server. We are the one company that is doing [Linux] on the desktop and the server across the board, big-time."

McNealy's Great Flip-Flop
Two days later, McNealy shifted gears, holding a press conference in which he claimed that the problems with both Linux and open-source software is that they offer a component approach to building the data center. To reduce cost and complexity, IT shops need to stop “building their own jalopies,” he said. Instead, they need to outsource data centers or buy them ready-made with pre-assembled, preconfigured, standard systems. Sun introduced such systems, including the Java Enterprise System, on Tuesday. Linux's initial popularity in business settings came from a lack of alternatives for the Intel platform, McNealy said in his Thursday conference. Linux offered a low-cost operating system that could handle Internet computing's demands, and it didn't pose the integration, security, pricing and licensing problems of Microsoft Windows.

Linux for Hobbyists, Solaris for the Enterprise?
Now, McNealy claims, businesses have a better alternative because Solaris is available on Intel x86, Opteron, Pentium, Xeon and other hardware. Solaris' advantage over Linux is that it has better scalability, thousands of enterprise applications, Sun's worldwide service and support organization, and new, competitive prices. Solaris is “indemnified” and runs no risk of being burdened with copyright lawsuits like the SCO Group's against IBM Corp., McNealy said. That's got to mean something, he said, to “large enterprises and media companies who can't afford to scoff at copyrights.” Linux doesn't fare well in the cost and complexity arena, either, in McNealy's opinion.

Open-source and Linux are for hobbyists and IT companies, not corporate IT shops, he said at the press conference. Referring back to his car analogy, McNealy called Linux hobbyists “jalopy-ists” who build systems piece by piece. To illustrate the wastefulness of the jalopy-ist approach, McNealy referred to a North American enterprise that has a “director of Linux kernel release engineering.” He likened that to a bank having a director of fuel-injection engineering because its employees drive cars. “It just doesn't make sense,” he concluded. Millions of “jalopy-ists” and several large IT firms—HP and IBM among them—no doubt hold a different opinion about Linux! SKHPC doesn't think this flip-flop will earn Sun many new friends, customers, or revenue.

And As If Linux Problems Weren't Enough...
In other news from Santa Clara, Sun Microsystems warned on Monday 29 September that its most recent quarter was a “particularly difficult” one and said it will post a significant loss. Although it has not yet finished its accounting for the first quarter, Sun said that it expects a loss of between 7 cents and 10 cents per share, including a tax provision of about a penny per share. In a statement, the server maker said the loss “reflects a particularly difficult quarter for the company due in part to intense market and competitive dynamics.”

Sun also announced that it is increasing an allowance it had made for its deferred tax assets, resulting in a $1B USD noncash charge in the fourth quarter, which ended June 30. As a result, the company said it is restating its fourth-quarter results to a loss of $1.04B USD, or 32 cents per share. It originally reported a $12M USD profit on revenue of ~$3B USD for the quarter. Sun had not given a prior estimate for the first quarter, which ended on September 28. Earlier in September, Sun announced it was cutting 1K jobs as part of its effort to return to profitability. µ

(c) 2003 by Terry C. Shannon, President, T.C. Shannon and Associates, LLC