John Brady's Weblog

The news from Sun continues in the same vein of more layoffs and more executives stating their view that McNealy is making the wrong decisions and is a liability to the success of Sun.

Sun has laid off 200 engineers, continuing the trend of slowly shrinking the company and the size and effect of the R&D budget. This is also reported at the Register.
Given that this is in a central SPARC group related to the high end systems, it makes me question just what Sun's strategy is with regard to R&D. Why do R&D in the first place, to only kill the whole project and layoff the development staff? Something similar happened with the UltraSPARC-V development, which was suddenly killed off. Nevertheless, the main message is still one of death by a thousand cuts, as Sun continues to cut costs on an ongoing basis, by laying off people in various groups, as its revenues continue to trail its costs and expenses.

The most amazing news for me, is that the ex-head of the whole of Sun's server developments has gone public with his views on McNealy and Shwartz, and it is not good for them. In a personal article John Shoemaker states that it was McNealy who refused to make significant cuts when the dot-com bubble burst, and as a result Sun is still weak and struggling. Now he sees McNealy as a liability, and that he should go for someone better able to run Sun. And that person is not Jonathan Schwartz, who is just too inexperienced (junior was the word he used). This reiterates points I have made earlier about Sun's lack of response to the downturn, and their total ignorance of the Intel and Linux marketplaces.