John Brady's Weblog

I see from recent announcements that senior managers and executives in Sun continue to leave the company. This reinforces my believe that Sun is suffering from both a lack of clear direction and future strategy, and that Scott McNealy is getting in the way of Sun doing the right things. If these were not true, why would senior managers continue to run from Sun as fast as they can, and in such numbers? Why not work to make it better, and reap the rewards as the company rebounds?

The head of software at Sun is going to Adbobe, leaving another hole to be filled at the top of Sun. And this news report also mentions the prior departure of the head of worldwide sales.

Don't forget that all of the original top executives that were there when Sun got to its peak during the dot-com boom before 2001 have all left. This includes people like Ed Zander, now running Motorola. Now we are seeing most of the second set of executives that Scott put into place leaving Sun. These were the people that Scott had confidence in to turn around Sun. Which of course has not happened. So Sun will be left with another change in the senior executives at the top, being the third set in 5 years.

Also it seems like most of the top executives from Storagetek have run as fast as they can from Sun, following its $4 billion purchase of Storagetek. Clearly these people have looked at the state of Sun today, and how it has handled the merger with the Storagetek organisation, and decided they are better off somewhere else. This is starting to look like another company Sun has paid a lot of money for, and is managing to drive out the original employees and in the process fail to capitalise on the products and technology they acquired. Anyone remember Cobalt, and Netscape, and Forte? The list continues to get longer.

The only positive bit of news about Sun is an upgrade in the target stock price from Morgan Stanley.
However, when you read the announcement closely, you realise that the analyst is actually agreeing with my general comments:

• Sun will not actually grow at all in the short term future
  
• Sun's products are not good enough to win new business and grow revenue
  
• Sun will only get better by significantly shrinking the size of the company to reduce costs
  

To quote the article: "expects the company will announce some sort of restructuring in the next six months", and also the analyst said: "We still don't have the confidence that organic growth will return on a sustainable basis."