Sun Microsystems has always been a favourite of journalists for its wonderfully headline-friendly name. “Sun rises…”, “Sun sets…”, “Sun shines a light on…” – maybe it doesn’t exactly challenge the skills of a subeditor, but you have to have something to cling on to.
Much like the company itself, which seems unsure whether to cling on to its independence or submit to the reality that the stock markets – and apparently IBM – do not think it is worth as much as Sun’s executives would like to think.
I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Sun – and not only for the chance it gives to recycle an old Nik Kershaw song into the headline for this blog post.
While Sun has in many ways typified the Silicon Valley culture – especially since Jonathan Schwartz and his ponytail took over as chief executive - there has always been something rather British about its recent progress.
Like many British firms, Sun has always had great technical skills, top-notch engineers, and excellent products – but has never quite managed to get the marketing right.
Like many British firms, Sun has seen the trends and innovations before others – its longstanding strapline of “the network is the computer” might just as well have said “it’s the internet, stupid”– but has never quite managed to make the most of such insights.
And like many British firms, its quirkiness and spikiness has made it a thorn in the side of bigger, more successful competitors – founder Scott McNealy’s constant chiding of Microsoft, for example – but has ended up being little more than an irritation to them.
Besides, you have to like a company that for many years was led by a man – McNealy – who names his children after cars: Maverick, Dakota, Colt, and Scout. It was never going to be the same after the ponytail.
But the sad truth is that for the past eight years Sun has thrashed around trying to make itself relevant again, as losses continued and its rivals strode ahead.
At its peak in the heyday of the dot com boom, Sun servers were de rigueur for every online startup. It was said at the time that as long as your business plan showed Sun servers at the heart of any new web business, the venture capital cash would roll in.
Sun was wrapped up in the excitement and hype of the time, flying journalists from all around the world to New York launches of even the most incremental of technical developments. I was lucky enough to be taken on one such event in 2000, and even in a time of such excess, it defined the phrase “no expense spared”.
Then the dot coms collapsed, and all those thousands of barely-used Sun servers flooded the second-hand market, and the supplier has never fully recovered. It has always retained a strong foothold in financial services and telecoms, but the credit crunch will have only put another nail into that particular market coffin.
Along the way, Sun has constantly tried to move with the times and remain relevant. It became an enthusiastic promoter of open source – but failed to work out how to make money out of it. It offered virtualisation years ahead of VMware, but not on Intel-based servers. It stuck rigidly to the mantra of Sparc processors and its Solaris operating system, but then started selling Intel and AMD and Linux.
Having said that, Sun has established one of the most successful industry standards around – Java. But somehow, yet again, it hasn’t really managed to capitalise fully on that success. If IBM were to eventually succeed in a takeover, it is highly likely Java would be made open source, a move many in the industry have already called for.
So now the firm is effectively “in play” – although neither Sun nor IBM has officially commented on the firms’ widely reported buyout talks.
Sun has gone from a server powerhouse to a niche player, one that is seen as a solid complement to another vendor’s product range.
It is a shame, in many ways, to see its light go dim. Cue the headlines…
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