Thursday, December 22, 2005
Sun's Strategy - What Strategy?
Long ago, when I worked for other computer vendors that competed against Sun,
we always argued Sun was small, had weak technology and would struggle in the long term.
We said they had no long term strategy that made any sense or would pay off for them.
In spite of this, Sun continued to grow while the other computer vendors did not.
So I eventually conceded that Sun probably did have a strategy
and that by working to this they were successful and would continue to grow.
This was one of the factors that influenced me to consider Sun when I was looking for
a job change in 1999. I joined Sun hoping to eventually understand this strategy better,
and to be there when it succeeded by following through on this strategy.
Well, I couldn't have been more wrong.
All the perception I got from 6 years of working for Sun
is that it has no apparent strategy at all, and that it just moves from one knee jerk
reaction to another, as it tries to react to things it has no control over.
Before I worked for Sun they were just another computer company amongst
all of the many others that existed at the time. So I did not take
any special notice of them. I only heard the headlines when big
things happened. And sometimes, these headlines were good news for Sun.
Such as the AT&T deal for co-developing UNIX System V, and Oracle using
Sun workstations for development, and Java taking off across the Web,
and the success of the high end E10000 system, and so on.
When I joined Sun I started to take a lot more notice about what Sun
was doing, and more of the detail about its complete product range
and the public press announcements it made.
Well, I never got access to any special information on Sun's strategy
that we weren't already sharing with the public, or that industry magazines
and web sites weren't already guessing at.
I was not in engineering, product development, marketing or headquarters.
So I was not privy to any special information on what Sun was up to.
When I head about it, Sun was just about to tell the
rest of the world a moment later.
As time went on rather then seeing the detail emerging of the strategy
that Sun was executing against, instead I saw a series of knee jerk
reactions from a bunch of people that clearly did not know what they
were doing. Why else would Sun have done any of the following?
- Killed off
Solaris on x86
due to a preceived lack of demand and market for it.
Then, months later, did a complete U-turn, and announced that it was
resurrecting Solaris on x86 within Sun
(even though it had probably already closed down the engineering teams)
because there WAS a public demand for it after all.
Talk about NOT being in touch with your market and knowing what your
customers want! - Then, having always said it would never produce Intel based systems
as SPARC was so superior and could go from the workstation to the
high end server with binary compatability,
Sun proudly announces that
it IS going to produce systems with genuine Intel processors in them.
Why? Because that's what customers want. No technical reasons.
But customers have been buying Intel based systems for MANY years.
That's why Intel is such a large company, and why so many other
computer companies use Intel processors.
Why suddenly decide that now is the time to use Intel processors,
many years after everyone else has been using them? - And say that Linux is for the low end, that Solaris is far superior,
and that it won't touch Linux at all. Then do a complete about
turn and
launch its own version of Linux
(anyone remember that?).
And make claims that Sun Linux would be better than Red Hat Linux,
and about how much engineering and support effort it was putting it
to make Sun Linux that much better. And then, less than a year
later,
kill off Sun Linux completely
[another article here],
saying that customers did
not want 'another version of Linux', and instead ship
Red Hat Linux as standard on its Intel systems.
Again, another example of NOT being in touch with what your customers really want! - Cobalt
- what was that all about? Buy a company to get into the
appliance market space, because that was a growing sector and
'they' said that customers really wanted Sun to make this kind
of product. Then just stop all new development, never release
a new or updated Cobalt product, end of life all the current
products over time, and give away all the Cobalt management
software to the open source community. And write off the
billions of dollars that it paid to
buy Cobalt in the first place.
Was that decision part of the strategy, or not? - Make promises it cannot deliver on, and then just go very, very quiet
about them. Such as N1, the future of systems management.
Well, all I can say is 'Don't hold your breath waiting for it'.
N1 seems to have disappeared completely. Sun doesn't mention it at all,
there have been no new products or features for the past few years,
and doesn't look like it either.
And now Sun says
it will open source N1! - Another thing is how much of Sun's future technology, products and roadmap
is NOT based on stuff invented and made at Sun, but rather on stuff
it got by buying other companies. Look closely and you will realise
that most of Sun's future is based on technology and products
it got by buying the company that invented it.
Look at Niagara!
Even N1, which we just refered to, was all based on products Sun
got by buying each company that had created them, such as
Terraspring. - And branding! Does Sun actually understand the concept of branding?
They changed the name of some of their core products so often even
I was getting confused.
So products which customers had always called one name
were now called something completely different.
Even though it was exactly the same product - Sun just changed the name for the sake of it.
So, the Netscape products that Sun got from AOL, became the iPlanet products.
Same products, but just rebranded as iPlanet instead.
Lots of advertising about this - read 'spending lots of money'.
Then Sun decides that it should change the name again.
So it all becomes 'Sun ONE'. Again, the same products, new name,
and money spent on advertising to tell everyone.
Does anyone remember 'Sun ONE'? Did this name make an impression anywhere?
So, when that fails, guess what? They decide to rename it again!
Now, the same products are all 'Java' products,
and part of the 'Java Enterprise System'.
So does Sun have a strategy? Maybe and maybe not.
If you judge it by the way it acts, then no, Sun does not have any strategy at all.
What Sun does appear to be doing is a series of random, unconnected decisions and actions,
many of which it either undoes and goes back on or does the complete opposite of
only a short period of time later.
The conclusion I came to after seeing all of the actions of Sun over
the past 6 years was that it does not have a strategy, and is really
in 'headless chicken' mode. It moves from one reactive action to another,
as it tries to deal with its declining revenue and market share.
And buys up companies to try and shore up its product lines and cover over gaps.
And try and somehow expand into new product segments to look like it
is growing and offering something new.
And hope that somewhere, one of these random, disparate actions
actually works, succeeds and provides some payback.
But so far none of them have, and nothing actually gets any better.
And now, if it can't make any product or technology work,
just open source it, give it away to the market,
and forget about it.
So, with no real strategy, and no clear direction, Sun continues to stagnate,
not growing and reporting flat revenues, if not actually declining in real terms.
And no sign of when any of this is going to end.
