You should take a walk through my employer – we are migrating acres of Oracle installed base to MySQL, and looking to do the same with NetApp to ZFS. We’re not looking at JQuery or Mongrel, we’re looking at 10′s of millions of dollars to Sun for enterprise infrastructure. So again, why are they the past? I can find Solaris experts everywhere on earth, just like Java and MySQL expertise.

You should look up from your laptop every once in a while, you might see the future. (And as best I understand, Twitter’s an utter disaster from an availability perspective – you might want to look to eBay or Google instead).

You sound an awful lot like an IBM employee. Are you one?

You should take a walk through my employer – we are migrating acres of Oracle installed base to MySQL, and looking to do the same with NetApp to ZFS. We’re not looking at JQuery or Mongrel, we’re looking at 10′s of millions of dollars to Sun for enterprise infrastructure. So again, why are they the past? I can find Solaris experts everywhere on earth, just like Java and MySQL expertise.

You should look up from your laptop every once in a while, you might see the future. (And as best I understand, Twitter’s an utter disaster from an availability perspective – you might want to look to eBay or Google instead).

You sound an awful lot like an IBM employee. Are you one?

Because they’re in very real danger of being bypassed by most of the market, and it makes more sense to liquidate now while there’s a modicum of value left, rather than waiting for the inexorable slide to zero.

The first question I’d ask is how much of Sun’s sales are to new customers, rather than to existing ones? How much of their sales are of SPARC-based hardware? How much of their sales are systems running Solaris? I suspect the answers to those questions are less than we might think.

The biggest problem for Sun is, no matter how good Solaris/OpenSolaris might be of an operating system, no matter how good their x86 boxes (for example, the “Thumper” storage server) are, customers want cheap, understandable and easily supported. Which means Linux on commodity “white-box” hardware. How many Solaris experts do you know? Especially when compared to the size of the Linux developer base?

Same thing goes for software. Simple and easily understandable (i.e. PHP, Rails, etc.) wins over complex and difficult. Even if Java may ultimately be a better technical solution, it’s faster and cheaper to write in Rails, and deal with problems later (i.e. Twitter).

It also doesn’t help that their recent inverse stock split and ticker symbol change doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence in the investor community, or that the most common reaction to meeting with their ponytailed CEO is one of “Is there a grown-up here I can talk to?”.

And most importantly, the reason Sun needs to call it a day is in order to release their highly-skilled engineering and software people into the wild, in order to help seed the next generation of technology startups. A more nobler purpose, in my opinion, than being a manufacturer of boutique systems to a rapidly-dwindling user base…

Because they’re in very real danger of being bypassed by most of the market, and it makes more sense to liquidate now while there’s a modicum of value left, rather than waiting for the inexorable slide to zero.

The first question I’d ask is how much of Sun’s sales are to new customers, rather than to existing ones? How much of their sales are of SPARC-based hardware? How much of their sales are systems running Solaris? I suspect the answers to those questions are less than we might think.

The biggest problem for Sun is, no matter how good Solaris/OpenSolaris might be of an operating system, no matter how good their x86 boxes (for example, the “Thumper” storage server) are, customers want cheap, understandable and easily supported. Which means Linux on commodity “white-box” hardware. How many Solaris experts do you know? Especially when compared to the size of the Linux developer base?

Same thing goes for software. Simple and easily understandable (i.e. PHP, Rails, etc.) wins over complex and difficult. Even if Java may ultimately be a better technical solution, it’s faster and cheaper to write in Rails, and deal with problems later (i.e. Twitter).

It also doesn’t help that their recent inverse stock split and ticker symbol change doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence in the investor community, or that the most common reaction to meeting with their ponytailed CEO is one of “Is there a grown-up here I can talk to?”.

And most importantly, the reason Sun needs to call it a day is in order to release their highly-skilled engineering and software people into the wild, in order to help seed the next generation of technology startups. A more nobler purpose, in my opinion, than being a manufacturer of boutique systems to a rapidly-dwindling user base…

The company that oughta’ wind down is Red Hat. I’m just stunned customers pay for that crap when they could run Oracle’s clone for nothing.

The company that oughta’ wind down is Red Hat. I’m just stunned customers pay for that crap when they could run Oracle’s clone for nothing.

Sun’s primary focus at this point should be migrating DTrace and ZFS to Linux, and working with existing customers to transition off Solaris as a prelude to a hand-off to Red Hat.

Sun’s primary focus at this point should be migrating DTrace and ZFS to Linux, and working with existing customers to transition off Solaris as a prelude to a hand-off to Red Hat.