Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Changes at Sun Microsystems

I think that McNealy leaving is a good thing, as apparently he was the only one standing in the way of mass layoffs at Sun. The word is that he was keeping the extra programmers around as an investment in potential future software development. That's commendable but eventually any company has to have a level of employees that makes the profit and loss statement work.

I don't think that the ex-Sun employees have had much difficulty finding work.

I think that Sun is heading in the right direction with its business strategy; they just need to get their costs under control. Taking the AMD Opteron and developing systems based on it and pushing them hard has been and will continue to be extremely successful. Sun was one of the first OEM's to take AMD's product and run with it. This is going to be a long term win for Sun.

Sun's primary problem has been that they were so successful during the dot com boom that they weren't focusing on building future business but rather moving their servers out the door as fast as they could. It takes time to re-orient a large company in the face of wrenching changes like the dot com boom and bust. HP has taken plenty of lumps but they are on the road to success again as well.

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