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Apr
30
Sramana Mitra wonders what Jonathan Schwartz is thinking after being elevated to the hot seat at Sun:
SUN, like Apple, has made its mark as a vertically integrated computer company with proprietary computer hardware and operating system. However, unlike Apple, the importance of the computer business has become questionable. The significance of the OS is questionable. The relevance of the chip business is definitely questionable.
To re-invent itself, Sramana avers that Schwartz ought to be looking for one product that Sun can use as its competitive advantage. In other words, the million-dollar question is “What is my equivalent of the iPod?”
Indeed. Is it Sun’s servers? Surely not in the hopelessly commoditized market, where “cheap eats better” is the norm. Is it SPARC? Nopes - Intel and AMD rule the roost here, and Sun, even under Scott McNealy, realized that, by releasing Solaris for the i386 architecture. Is it Solaris?
This is probably Sun’s best bet. Linux, although very popular, has nowhere the kind of brand that Sun has built up around Solaris 10. This is one area where Sun has gone about its marketing with a kind of holy zeal. And Sun has put in a lot into the OS - Dtrace, ZFS, Predictive self-healing, and Zones. Now is the time to decouple the Solaris brand from the rest of Sun’s hardware and make it an enterprise OS across vendors’ server lines.
Releasing Solaris to the Open Source community is also a very strong strategic move. If Scott McNealy is recognized as the father of the Open Systems revolution, then opening up Solaris must be his most significant achievement. It is upto Sun now to build as enthusiastic a community around Solaris as Linux has, and that is the challenge that faces top management at Sun. Blogs are one way of accomplishing this - getting the most out of Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Eric Schrock, Mike Shapiro, Alan Hargreaves, and even Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the original founders of Sun and still one of its most respected individuals. Get them to discuss their vision, their code, their problems online, solicit opinions from developers across the community. Sun’s engineers are its biggest PR officers - get them to attend and speak at Developer Conferences, host Solaris-specific equivalents of the Ottawa Linux Symposium, even participate in events like the OLS.
Sell the Solaris brand as a sort of a “premium Linux”. Adopt a more Cathedral-style approach to its development (as opposed to Linux’s bazaar-style), but always develop in the community, not inside hermetically-sealed labs inside of Sun. Those kind of days are over. Sramana answers the iPod question in a related way:
“What are SUN’s major assets? The brand, particularly the enterprise computing brand is perhaps the biggest at this point. But we are trying to leverage it in very traditional ways, mostly by selling servers and services around servers, while margins in that business keep shrinking. We need to get out of this commodity business, and find a related but non-commodity niche.”