John Brady's Weblog

Sun's Silliness Continues - Stock & Storage

2007-10-10T21:13:00.001+01:00

I've laid off making comments about Sun for a while, but with the recent 2 announcements I just had to add my two pennies worth.

First Jonathan Schwartz decides to change the stock ticker symbol for Sun from SUNW to JAVA. Boy, you wonder how many MBA classes he studied to come up with that idea to save Sun and turn it back into a growing profitable company?

By his own admission, this change has no bearing or impact on the value of Sun as a company or of how people will decide on whether to purchase shares of Sun or not. So why bother? What kind of argument is he trying to put forward here? On the one hand this will have no net impact at all, but on the other hand ... nothing. So lets change our stock symbol anyway, at great cost (it cannot be free to do this), confuse everybody who knew our old symbol, and provide no benefit to anyone as a result. Must have been a quiet quarter there at Sun, Jonathan.

But the really amazing thing to me, is that Jonathan clearly does not understand what Sun is as a company, and how it makes profit and so a return for shareholders. It does this through being a computer hardware company. Sun gets revenue from selling computer hardware, and not from selling computer software. Yes, it has lots of software, but these don't make money for it.

Sun has open sourced and given away almost all of the software it has, and certainly all of the key ones. Sun's recent history includes a long list of software companies it has bought, not known what to do, failed to be able to make money from the software, and then given it away for free and tried to wash its hands of it. StarOffice, N1, and now Solaris and its Java Application Server (GlassFish). It has even given away the software it got from hardware companies it bought, such as Cobalt.

Sun also has bought many different software companies all doing the same thing. At one time it had 3 different Java Application Servers (NetDynamics, Netscape and Forte). It has bought several File System companies, only to do ZFS to replace all of them. And several Cluster related companies. So Sun has had a lot of software products over the years.

So, in spite of the fact that Sun only makes money from computer hardware and has pretty much given away for free all the software it has ever had, Jonathan thinks that the new stock symbol should be based on a piece of software. Solaris? No. Java.

Why pick on Java? In reality it is actually more of the odd one out. The one piece of new software that was successful, compared to all of the many, many others that have been quietly brushed aside and forgotten about. And Java is not even a product. It is a technology. Which was invented by engineers at Sun, but is now available within many different products from many different companies.

Jonathan has given this bizarre argument about how this new stock symbol will 'push the brand of Java', but Java isn't a brand it is a technology. It stands for a very specific piece of technology. And when he goes on about people using Java, the majority of them are not using it on Sun hardware - whether computers or mobile phones or anything else. So Sun is really a small part of the Java story now, and Java doesn't make any money for Sun but does for a lot of other companies. By using Java he is actually watering down and distracting from everything else that Sun does well, such as the new multi-threaded SPARC chips.

If I didn't know more about Sun, I would presume that this change in stock symbol was heralding its exit from computer hardware and signifying a move into pure software. Which couldn't be further from the truth. Sun only makes money from the computer hardware it sells, and nothing from the software it makes. The only money it makes from software is from selling support services for that software, which is really turning it into a subscription service rather than a product.

Second, Sun merges its Storage division with its Server division. So having paid $4 billion for StorageTek about 2 years ago, which presumably had good products and knew how to sell them, Sun has managed to destroy whatever added value was present in there and now has nothing it can do with it other than just throw it in with the Server division and lump them all together. Haven't we seen all of this before with other hardware companies such as Cobalt? So just why did you buy StorageTek in the first place then?

Personally I have always said that Sun has failed miserably in the storage marketplace, and it should just keep it simple and stop trying to play with the big boys. It tried to get into storage too late, after everyone else had made the move; tried to catch up but couldn't; and tried to make people believe it had truly open storage products when it didn't. It seems to have fooled itself into believing that if it told everyone often enough that Sun was good at storage, then eventually everyone would believe them and start buying their storage products. But it has never happened, and never will.

Simply put, Sun's storage products have never been truly open. They have never really worked in a truly multi-platform environment, and have mainly been made to work against Sun servers running Solaris. Any support of other platforms has always been very restrictive. And as a result, in spite of buying many companies and doing OEM deals, and launching product after product, Sun has never been successful in storage. Many of the comments on Jonathan's blog entry reflect this, and also the Register says it too.

And Sun continues to lay off people. And so it will go on.

Call Of The Wild - Guy Grieve

2007-05-23T20:30:00.000+01:00

I read this book some months ago, having bought it after seeing a television documentary on Channel 4 in the UK about it (see a previous blog post). Overall I liked the book and enjoyed reading about Guy's 9 months in Alaska, trying to build a log cabin himself, and the arrangements to make it all happen. The book is really just a chronological telling of all that happened to Guy since deciding he had to do something different and get out of the 9 to 5 of corporate life in a big city. No big insights as to why he had to do this - other than being sick of the 9 to 5 work in an office - nor any deep meditations on the lessons he learnt. Just a straightforward telling of what happened during the 9+ months of it all.

Generally this format worked well - a very direct telling of what happened, and often some nice details about the people and places he went. He doesn't skimp on the details of what happened - the book is over 350 pages - and he writes well, at least I thought so. The plain telling also seemed to lend a touch of honesty to it all - Guy did not seem like the kind of person who would want to dress anything up more than it was. You felt that this indeed was really what happened.

My main reason for buying the book, apart from the inspiration of such an adventure, was to find out more of the details left out of the very brief and sometimes vague television documentary. The documentary annoyed me because it left more questions unanswered than answered. Whole series of events were skipped over in the documentary. In the book Guy covers everything, so that it is very clear what happened.

The main question in my mind was "How does one inexperienced person build a proper log cabin on their own within a month, and in Alaska?". And as I expected the answer is - they get a lot of help from other people who know how to do it. Obviously the television documentary people had their own agenda, and could not leave gaps. So they painted the picture that Guy built the cabin himself. Guy is more honest in the book. He chopped down the trees to make the logs that the base would sit on. These were put in place and the floor laid by his Alaska friends, within 2 days. Then they left Guy to chop down the rest of the trees, and remove the bark from them. When they returned, the Alaskans built all the walls of the log cabin, and just left Guy to top off the roof. This entailed fitting some end posts as gables, a ridge pole, and then laying sheets of tin on top as the roof material. So the speedy build of the log cabin was down to Guy's new friends, and not his own abilities.

In many respects he was a lucky man, and this comes through in the book. It was the combinations of good luck that got Guy to Alaska, got him a log cabin, food, and even a dog team.

My only complaints about the book are that I did not get any feeling for how this changed Guy, and that Guy can be quite negative about himself at times. In the middle of reading these different descriptions of all the things that Guy has achieved in such a short period of time, he will often throw in a comment about how useless he felt and belittling himself. I was always amazed at these comments, especially in a book that I had bought to be inspired by. To be inspired by the place that is Alaska, and the man that had given up his job and left his family for 9 months just to achieve some 'dream' he had. But even when Guy seems to be achieving all that he set out to do, he cannot help putting himself down. I found this annoying, as it just did not sit with the rest of the story. If he really did not believe in himself, he would never have left his job nor gone to Alaska. I can only presume that he has some complex or other, and needed to keep putting himself down in various ways in the book.

So, a good book, well written, telling one man's story of his 9 month stay in Alaska, only marred by the author's own negative self comments.

Escape to Alaska - Channel 4 TV

2006-09-28T15:59:00.000+01:00

I managed to watch "Escape to Alaska" on video the other night, which I had taped from Channel 4 the other week. It is an hour long documentary, about Guy Grieve who works in Edinburgh, Scotland, and who wants to experience Alaska.
I was looking forward to it for two reasons: I am interested in the idea of escaping from the modern slave labour of the 9 to 5 corporate work job to reconnect with the natural world; and in Alaska as a remote, unmodernised place which still has many open, wild spaces in it. Overall I found it a weird programme to watch.

I enjoyed the early part where Guy Grieve described why the 9 to 5 in a large city was so soulless, and why he wanted a more direct connection with the world itself, and how he was attracted to and fascinated by Alaska.

Then, of course, he travels to Alaska, and sets about getting established with somewhere to live before the winter sets in, which he wants to experience. And that is when things got really weird, and I ended up questioning whether what I was seeing was really what happened.

First, he arrives in Alaska in late August / early September, with between 4 and 6 weeks before the snows arrive. In this period he has to build his own log cabin, from scratch. This is just too late to turn up and expect to get it all done before the cold spell hits. He should have turned up in July, and become acclimatised and accustomed to Alaska. Why did he leave it so late? Why did he not go out one month earlier? It just does not make any sense at all to go out that late in the season, and that close to the snows arriving.

Then, he meets up with Alaskan people that he has already been in contact with, and who will be helping him out, one way or another. This smacks of quite some prearranging on his part, to contact these people, make these agreements, and arrange access to the land where he is to build a cabin and stay the winter. How these arrangements were made is not explained. Very mysterious. If he had really been in contact with locals, he should have known to come out earlier in the year, as mentioned.

Guy then goes out to the remote area, sets up a tent, and begins cutting down trees in preparation for building his cabin within 4 to 6 weeks. Or rather he doesn't. He cuts down one tree, which falls onto his tent, and has to repair this mess. Instead of getting back to the tree cutting after this, he spends the next 2 weeks simply wandering around the area, with no sense of urgency at all, looking for food supplies, and not cutting down a single tree. This is bizarre behaviour. He knows he has less than 6 weeks before the snows, and just wastes 2 weeks wandering around on his own, without a care in the world.

He is saved when his local contact, Dave if I remember correctly (but I could be wrong), turns up to check on his progress. Within one day Dave has a number of trees cut down, properly, and is showing Guy the correct way to do everything.

At this point, the camera crew that has been with him these past 2 weeks leave. They come back 8 weeks later, after the snows have arrived, and the land is snow covered and the rivers and lakes frozen. Guy is now living in the log cabin, that he has built himself. And it looks impressive too. A well built, single room cabin. But hang on. How did Guy manage to build this to such a high standard when he couldn't even chop down a tree? We are shown early on that Guy is an office worker, who uses a telephone and computer keyboard each day. There is no mention of him having any wood working skills at all. Where did all this ability come from?

I can only conclude that Guy did not build the cabin himself, but instead his local contacts came in and did it for him. Otherwise he would have frozen to death in his tent. The log cabin looked exactly how it should be, with no skewed or leaning walls. All the logs were true and straight, and laid on top of each other, and striped of bark. And all this done by someone who couldn't even chop down a single tree on his own? I don't think so.

I know from reading a few books on Alaska, such as "One Man's Wilderness" by Sam Keith, that an important part of a cabin in Alaska is making it free of air leaks. If there are any major holes, then the heat will leak out and the cold come in - very quickly. And key to minimising the holes is preparing the logs, so that they are straight and true, with flat, even sides that will sit square on each other. There is no way that someone such as Guy, with no previous wood working or cabin building experience, could have built a log cabin like that in 4 weeks, and have made it well insulated enough to withstand an Alaskan winter.

Then someone loans Guy a dog sled team. This is not something done lightly in Alaska, as it takes time and money to feed and train a dog team, and they can be very valuable. No way is someone just going to loan a good dog team to a complete stranger with no prior experience, who wants to look after the dogs many miles away. Again, more signs of behind the scenes work and preparations.

Furthermore, Guy is over 50 miles away from the nearest village. So he is going to have to look after these dogs, and feed them every day. Again, this is a massive risk, letting a working dog team go with a complete stranger, who has to feed them every day to keep them alive. If he gets anything wrong, so far away from help, the dogs will just die. And where does the food for the dogs come from? Clearly a team of six or eight dogs is going to eat a lot more than one man. So where is Guy getting all of this food from, to feed himself and these dogs, each and every day? At various points it is made clear that Guy is not a natural hunter, and has almost no success in shooting or catching anything.

Later on we learn sometime during January / February that Guy has not eaten meat for over a month, and is trying to capture come beaver in a nearby lake. So what has he been living on then? Clearly he has a massive cache of supplies of dried and preserved goods by the cabin, to live on during the winter. And this is what he is living on. During the whole programme we only see him get one grouse like bird and one beaver. So, he was never in desparate circumstances during this self imposed exile. And how did he afford all of these supplies, bought in advance? I know from reading on the web that he was sponsered by a Scottish whisky company. Clearly some of their money was used on these supplies he bought.

It would seem that neither the television company or the whisky sponsor wanted Guy to be seen to fail, so behind the scenes they made sure that everything he needed was provided for.

The television programme came over very much as telling a story of a family man, troubled by the modern world, who needed to reconnect with nature in some way. And off Guy went to Alaska, built his own log cabin, survived all on his own, and came back home a better person for it. Which I do believe to be true.

But I think they left a lot out, such as the sponsorship money, the vast supplies of food stored in a cache by the log cabin, who really built the log cabin, and what else he did during the six month long winter? He didn't seem to achieve anything at all other than staying alive. All in all it felt like someone had promised a meal full of special tastes, but instead delivered something very bland that left you wanting more and wondering what was left out that could have made it much more interesting.

I've bought the book he's written about his adventure - Call of the Wild - so I'll see what other details he gives about what really happened.

August Update

2006-09-27T16:37:00.000+01:00

During August we were lucky enough to have two holidays away.
While both were very enjoyable in their own way, they could not have been more different in style and experience.

The first was to the Oceania Club in Greece.
This is an all inclusive hotel resort on the Halkidiki pensinsula, in the north east part of the mainland.
The hotel was very new and very good, and the service and food was excellent.
It is a family oriented hotel, and so was full of families with children.
The hotel runs its own kids clubs, to keep the children entertained during the day.
And the weather was hot, which is to be expected.
So the family had a really good, enjoyable holiday.

Although we did not do much - just lie around on sun loungers in the hot sunshine each day, by the pool or beach - it was a very good and relaxing holiday.
As said, the hotel was very good, and the food and service were excellent.
The attitude of all of the hotel staff was excellent - always helpful, asking if there was anything they could do for you, and nothing was too much trouble.
In many respects, it would be difficult to pick real faults with the hotel.
Although not perfect, it lived up to expectations, and generally exceeded them.
Little details, like a sun umbrella for every pair of sun loungers.
This is important when you have children and want to ensure they do not
get too much sun exposure.

The second holiday was to the highlands of Scotland, staying at the Crieff Hydro Hotel, which is just west of Perth.
The hotel advertises itself very much as a family oriented hotel with child friendly facilities.
Initially we were impressed on arrival by the substantial main, old building of the hotel itself. But then things went downhill quickly.

The room we were allocated was essentially in the basement, at the extreme edge of the hotel. We had to walk down flights of stairs and along long corridors, including going past the leisure facilities, to get to our room. It was one of only three at this end of the hotel. Yes, we did have normal windows and an outside view, due to the hotel being sited on a hill. But it didn't stop the feeling of being in the basement and isolated as you negotiated the stairs each and every day.

The room itself was very old and tired, with a very small bathroom (I could reach out and touch both side walls at the same time). And they called this an 'executive family room'. I suppose this was because the main bedroom area was large. But then we discovered dust in the corner, dead flies under the windows, crumbs under the beds, and worst of all - someone else's clothes in one of the drawers! Needless to say we complained like mad to the hotel duty manager.
Although he apologised profusely, all he did was arrange for the room to be cleaned again. "Why wasn't it cleaned properly in the first place?"
He couldn't offer any explanation at all.
He claimed rooms were always cleaned, so this should not have happened.
But the point was it did happen, and they had not cleaned the room properly before giving it to us.

They would not offer us another room, as they said they were full during the main holiday period. They did give us a free bottle of wine with our meal that evening, but that was all. Considering the price I was paying for this executive room, they were making a lot of money off me, and couldn't be bothered to offer a better level of customer service beyond just a verbal apology and fixing something that should never have happened in the first place.

The rest of the hotel was okay, but being family oriented meant lots of screaming children running around the place.
Which is fine to a point, as we were there with our children too. But in an old hotel building with narrow corridors, it did seem crowded some of the time.
And the indoor swimming pool was full of children most of the day too.
Although the facilities offered make quite a long list, the actual quality of them is only just 'okay', and some of them are so far away from the hotel as to not be worth bothering with.

Evening meals were 'interesting'. There are two restaurants. One is more formal, which they try and attract outside customers to, and the other is informal, casual. Children were allowed in both restaurants, which was good.
Perversely the informal restaurant had a worse choice of food on offer for children than the formal restaurant. Yes, we have a 'modern' child who is quite happy eating things like 'chicken nuggets', but not pizza or anything with cheese on it. The only thing he could eat on the informal menu was a baked potato. And the children's menu was fixed, and never changed in this restaurant. As a result we ate in the formal restaurant each night, which did offer a different children's menu each night.

Overall the hotel came out barely okay - I'd give it 5 out of 10, but only because of the number of facilities offered. But the quality of everything is very dubious, there is no concept of customer service at all, the prices are a rip off (read very expensive), and they are spending more money on more child specific facilities in order to charge you even more in the future. If only they could run it like a real hotel, and have a proper house cleaning operation where rooms were checked for cleanliness. Then things might be quite different. But really it felt more like some kind of production line, where they wheel guests in, don't treat them in any special way or care about their experience, and take as much money off them as they can for the right to be there.

I certainly won't be going back there. There is no way I would consider staying at a hotel that fundamentally did not know how to clean its rooms properly (something I consider to be a 'basic' aspect of a hotel), did not check that rooms were cleaned properly before new guests arrived, and had a level of customer service that amounted to "We are sorry, but we aren't going to actually do anything to make up for a wholly inadequate level of service to you".

In spite of all that, we did have a nice holiday. Scotland is a wonderful place, which is why we went there. And that rescued the holiday for us.
Next time we go back to the highlands we shall simply stay in another hotel,
save a lot of money, and have a far better and more pleasant experience.

Now of course, we are all back to the normal work routine again, and the children are back at school. Life carries on ...

July Update and Longleat

2006-08-01T10:34:00.000+01:00

I've not posted anything for some time as I've not had any spare time to write up a blog entry. Not that I've been flat out busy, but just that there has never been any free time between all the other things that I needed to do. I do want to write more blog entries on interesting topics to me, so I'll struggle to find the time from somewhere. I also want to lay off the Sun knocking, as I have said most of the things that I wanted to say, and I think things will play themselves out over the course of time. Though I do keep wondering when those new joint Sun / Fujitsu systems are going to see the light of day? If ever.

I've read quite a few blogs from other people about Peak Oil recently, and it all seems to make sense to me. I've always felt that humans were bleeding the earth dry, and that something would go wrong somewhere at sometime. And now it seems like it might be the oil running out sooner rather than later, instead of global warming, which causes a major change in the way people actually live their lives.

I spent the last weekend visiting Longleat, which is a safari park in England set in the grounds of a large stately home (a massive house, with even larger grounds around it). The park has various animals in it such as lions, tigers, giraffes, rhinos and monkeys, and you drive around in your car through the large fields to see the animals. The whole thing reinforced my knowledge that the whole of humanity is stupid, and must go down the drain sooner or later, and drove home the fact that humanity was just way too stupid to try and save itself.

Longleat is notorious for the monkey enclosure. In this field you drive through in your car, the monkeys are free to roam, and often climb onto the cars as they slowly drive through. The monkeys are well known for pulling anything they can get hold of off your car - such as windscreen wipers, aerials, bumpers, or any rubber trimmings. They have put up signs warning you of this, and saying you enter at your own risk.

Being a summer weekend, the park was packed full of cars, all moving slowly. Well, half way through the monkey enclosure, the monkeys get onto a couple of the cars in front of me. No problem I think. As long as the drivers keep on moving, the monkeys will get bored and get off for the cars following behind. But NO! The drivers of the cars about four in front of me decide to stop, and block everyone behind them. So now these monkeys are free to roam over all the cars stuck behind these two IDIOTS at the front, who have decided to stop for a full 5 minutes in one area where car damage is virtually guaranteed. At this point I just could not believe the STUPIDITY of these people. What were they thinking at that moment? Were their minds so totally blank that they were unaware of the monkeys climbing on all the cars behind them? Did they not realise that they were blocking ALL the traffic, so that NONE of the cars could move forward. Did they not see the long queue behind them extending all the way back to the entrance? And the open road in front of them?

Luckily my car did not get damaged significantly. They did pull on the back wiper and the washer jet where water comes out of, but nothing was damaged irreversibly. But other cars did have things pulled completely off them, while these IDIOTS at the front just sat there. For me this just drove home how completely stupid humans are, at all levels, and how unaware they are of everything going on around them. No matter what happens, humans just seem to ignore all they can see and the information around them, and carry on doing what they want to, regardless. And these idiots driving the cars at the front, so unaware of everything happening behind them and the other drivers having their cars attacked, are deemed legally fit to drive cars on our roads. That made me really worried. If these people cannot even drive around a one way system in a safari park properly, what are they going to be like on a public road with many other cars moving much faster, and in both directions? At that moment, as I said, I realised that there was no hope for humanity, and it was just full of stupid people messing things up for the small percentage of those who wanted to do the right thing.

The other thing that drove home the stupidity of humanity, was the conditions of the animals at Longleat. I am not on about the general conditions they are in - this is all very good, and much better than a zoo in my view, as the animals are not in cages, but in fields they can roam about. In many respects these animals are in more natural surroundings than those confined to much smaller enclosures and cages in zoos.

No, the key difference that I immediately realised is that the animals in their native habitat would be be breathing in the relatively clean air in Africa or India or wherever. But here in Longleat, they breathe in car exhaust fumes! ALL DAY LONG! This place is crying out to have electric buses put in place, to replace all of the individual cars driving around and spewing out pollutants directly in the faces of these animals. Instead of having thousands of cars drive through these fields every day of the summer, they could have the cars all park outside the park at the entrance, where all the people would board electric buses, and be transported around the park pollution free. And then there would be no traffic jams in the park, caused by IDIOT drivers! And they could supply a commentary on the bus, providing information about the animals and how they live, which I am sure would be much more interesting to the children, rather than being couped up in a car for 2 hours.

Yes, 2 hours to drive an internal combustion engine driven car around a few fields, polluting constantly for 2 hours, just to look at a few animals sitting in some fields. CRAZY! If Longleat REALLY cared about the health and well being of these animals they would have put in electic buses years agos. Clearly the people running Longleat are more concerned with their ability to generate money and stick it in the bank, than they are for their animals. Why else would they not invest in a fleet of electic or even hydrogen buses? Why do they continue to let these poor animals breath in car exhaust fumes day after day after day? And add more pollution to the planet in general? None of which is necessary for want of a few buses.

Anyway, that's all for now. I'm off on holiday for the next few weeks, so I'll try and post something interesting one way or another when I get back.

Sun to layoff 5000 people!

2006-06-04T20:58:00.000+01:00

Well, as I said in my previous post, Jonathan Schwartz would have to layoff a load of people at Sun to make it profitable again. The only question was would he strike quickly and take the penalty in Q4 of Sun's financial year, or wait it out a bit longer until the next financial year and blame things on the situation he inherited?

Well, he's decided to get on with it, and has
announced that between 4,000 and 5,000 people will be laid off.
This makes another layoff of over 10% of their employees, which I make to be at least the fourth such layoff of this size. There have of course been other smaller layoffs as well, such as the recent layoffs of 200 SPARC engineers.
So now Sun will have laid off at least 40% of its total workforce over the past 5 years. Way to go guys! I think I already blogged about the 'death by a thousand cuts' scenario playing out at Sun. And here it is again.

Bizarrely, Sun have announced this massive layoff as a growth plan. Another example of Sun's brilliant senior management reasoning abilities. Who else would try and position laying off 5,000 people as a growth in the company? Wierd!

In summary, I am not surprised at any of this, as I have seen it coming for some time now, and is exactly what I said would happen. I was just unsure of the precise timing.

And don't forget, this is not just 5,000 people from what was Sun in 2001 of 40,000. This is Sun which has since acquired a long list of other companies, including the likes of Cobalt, and more recently StorageTek, Seebeyond and Tarantella. The list is really quite long when you examine it. Sun may actually be laying off people from the very companies that it spent a lot of money to acquire in the first place. Talk about bad strategy and management!

PS. I've also had a chance to recently benchmark a T2000 system with an UltraSPARC T1 processor in it, and it is not fast! In reality a single 1.2 GHz T1 CPU is comparable to 32 * 250 MHz UltraSPARC-II CPUs. So, yes, a lot of total processing capacity, comparable to an E10000 system from 1997 or so. But in today's world when all other CPU cores work at 1 GHz or above, squeezing 4 threads onto one core just ends up with all 4 running quite slowly. An impressive engineering effort, but only really applicable to highly parallelised, scalable, multi-threaded applications, like web sites. But not really suited to back end database systems. The T2000 was out performed in all of my tests by a 2 * UltraSPARC-IV+ V490, which can be doubled in capacity to 4 CPUs. Something the T2000 cannot do. Don't believe everything Sun tell you!

Goodbye Scott McNealy

2006-04-26T20:14:00.000+01:00

So,
Scott McNealy has stepped down from the CEO position of Sun.
About time too.
This has been some time coming, but is clearly the right thing for Sun.

As I have mentioned in previous blogs, it was getting so that all anyone else was talking about was how McNealy had mismanaged Sun after the dot-com bubble burst.
There were many ex-Sun executives who had said that it was McNealy that had made the wrong decisions, and not taken the right actions when the company revenues were slashed by a third overnight. And that was the primary reason they left Sun to go work somewhere else, where they stood a better chance of success than at Sun. Again, see my past blog entries for comments from past executives who have left Sun for greener pastures.

And with every other senior executive having left Sun, the only person Scott has left to hand over the reins to is Jonathan Schwartz.
Someone who I don't consider has proved himself to be a top class executive.
Literally, he just looks like the guy left over after everyone else had left Sun.

I'm glad I'm not working for Sun anymore.
This must be an incredibly nervous time for the people there.
They all know that Sun is still shrinking and losing money (see the latest quarterly results).
The general opinion is that Sun's revenues continue to underperform from where they should be.
And the expectation is that they will have to lay yet more people off to reduce costs in order to ever get back to a profit.
The question then becomes one of when, not if.

So will Jonathan Schwartz strike quickly and announce massive layoffs to reduce costs, and take the penalty of the cost of the layoffs in Sun's fourth quarter? That way he can start a new financial year on 1 July 2006 in a new position, having put his stamp on the company. And the next financial year's performance will all be his responsibility.
He might even make a profit for Sun, at last.
But to do that, he would have to layoff a lot of people at Sun. Well over 10%, maybe 15% or 20%. Who knows.

Or will he hedge his bets, and delay it until the first or second quarter of Sun's next financial year? That way he can blame the situation he inherited for any bad results, before he has to deliver a fully profitable year at Sun in 2007/2008.

Either way, the consensus among the analysts is that there will be more cost cutting at Sun. So all the employees at Sun can do is continue to wait for the day when the 'big announcement' happens.

Sun - Continues to sink

2006-04-23T16:13:00.000+01:00

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.

When to leave? Is this a good or bad company?

2006-03-30T21:08:00.000+01:00

During my recent change in job I started doing some reading about finding jobs, and identifying the types of jobs I was best suited for. I have continued to do some reading around this general topic of finding work, employment and the nature of companies today. I recently came across an article describing various signs to look out for, telling you it is time to get ready to leave your current job and employer. There are classic things in there about having a bad manager, and about being overworked but never getting the recognition for it.

It started me thinking about whether I could have spotted the failures with my previous employers, before they went too far downhill and I had to bail out. Which made me realise another sign of when it is time to get out before it is too late. I had been aware of this sign all the time, but always presumed it was not critical. However, with hindsight I now believe it is, and should not be ignored.

The sign can be termed: What would you do with this company in this position?

Put yourselves in the shoes of the top executives, whether the CEO, the head of design or development, head of sales, marketing or whatever. Given what you know about your company and the market it operates in, what do you personally believe is the best thing for it to do for
medium to long term success?

If you find yourself coming to a different conclusion than the senior executives in the company, then my advise is to find another job in another company as soon as possible. My experience is that the workers at the bottom, dealing with customers and suppliers (at the coalface as I like to think of it) do know how the company works and what is going on. They are far closer to the reality of the market and their customers than senior management are. And if you think the right direction for the good of the company is different to where the senior management are taking it, then it can only fail. And it is better to get out before it is too late, and either the company collapses or there is a significant restructuring and you get laid off.

I believe that this has applied to all 3 of my previous jobs:

First, a UK company selling computer systems from a new US manufacturer in the late 1980s. The faults were not necessarily with the UK company, but with the US company that it had a reseller agreement with.

The first mistake was that this manufacturer decided to take on Sun, which was already the market leader for small UNIX systems. Given the market prescence Sun already had, it was almost impossible to expect to catch up and over take them in a few years.

The second mistake was that they signed OEM agreements with a number of existing, established computer companies. Although this might seem good for the short term, I could see that the situation would become one where different suppliers were actually all bidding the same computer systems they were OEM'ing from the same manufacturer. If the computers were physically identical, then the customer could clearly play off the suppliers against each other to get the lowest purchase price. And some of those OEM resellers were big companies with deep pockets, and would obviously go to extreme lengths to win business and maintain revenue, even if their profits suffered.

Luckily I saw the signs and got out before it was too late. As their revenues declined due to this competition with other computer suppliers selling the exactly the same equipment, the UK company was forced to merge with another computer company, to become a small part of a larger whole.
Then Sequent Computer Systems during the 1990s. Although Sequent initially enjoyed good growth due to a well designed product, ahead of its time, by the mid 1990's it was still a single product company. When compared to the other mainstream computer companies, they all had multiple product ranges - from workstations through small and medium computer servers, to large, mainframe class systems. Sequent though, had only one, single product, even though it was highly configurable and scaleable. When Sequent underwent a product transition to the next generation product, it became only too obvious that the whole company's revenue stream and profit were dependent on one product. If that failed, so did the company.

Again, seeing the writing on the wall I got out before Sequent collapsed. I managed to do it just before they announced the takeover by IBM. If you look at Sequent's revenue stream and profits for the previous 2 years, you realise they were losing money badly and probably would have gone bust anyway.
And finally Sun Microsystems. On the face of it Sun should have continued to be a successful company, even after the dot-com bubble burst. It was large, successful, had good products, and a good workforce. However, bad management meant that at every turn Sun did the wrong thing. Its revenues have declined by one third from their peak, it has continued to have layoffs almost every year, and yet also spent money buying up other companies and expanding into new product areas.

I could see immediately that if your revenue coming in to the company has dropped by one third, then you need to cut the expenditure going out of the company by the same amount. Literally the revenue was not there to support a company of that size, without reporting significant loses. Which is what started to happen. So Sun laid off some people, but only 10%. I could see that this was clearly not enough. And so a year later, Sun reported another loss, and another 10% layoff. And again the year later.

Given that the market had shrunk in real terms, it seemed to me that another wise move would be to trim your product range, focussing on a core set of high margin products, where you could differentiate from the competition. This in turn would lead to major savings in R&D as you could close down whole product divisions and lay those people off. In other words, deep cuts in a few specific areas, not a general cut back across all departments. As I have said, Sun didn't do this. They went for a 10% layoff across all departments. And continued to push ahead into new product areas, where they could not differentiate from the competition, and which would require significant investment to win market share.

I'm thinking of disk arrays here, and also web application server software. Instead of getting out of those areas, Sun ploughed more money into them instead. A disk is just a disk, which you can write to and later read from. No matter how much R&D you put into it, it will still do the same as all the other disk arrays - attach to a computer and store data. How are you going to win back the cost of the R&D for newer faster disk arrays, when the cost per MB of storage is dropping? It just never made sense. In fact Sun was so incapable of producing a high performing disk array that they signed an OEM agreement with Hitachi Data Systems. This was after something like 3 previous attempts to produce a high end disk array themselves (the A3500, the A5000 and the T3). Even since then Sun continues to sink money into disk storage. Witness the $4 billion purchase of Storagetek. Will they ever learn?

And the software front? They had three different Jave application server products at one point in time. How do you end up with 3 different, identical pieces of software. They first bought NetDynamics, then they acquired the Netscape server via AOL, and then they purchased Forte. Having merged the 3 products several years later, they decided to rename it all iPlanet. Remember that? Then they changed the name again to SunONE. And then they renamed to Java something or other, and decided to bundle it with Solaris. So all of the investment in the different software products Sun had, literally came to nothing because they started giving the software away. And guess what happens when you start giving stuff away - your revenue doesn't grow! Duh! You can't grow your revenue when you don't charge customers for your products.

Unfortunately for me, even though I saw all these signs, I presumed that Sun would eventually turn the corner and things would be fine again. Okay Sun might be smaller, but things would settle down, and revenue would slowly grow again and Sun would break even and then even make a small profit. And its breadth of products meant that it would still have useful products for different customers. So I decided to hang in there, through all of the layoffs and the ridiculous management decisions, and hope that there would eventually be a light at the end of the tunnel. But I was wrong. The signs were there, and could not be argued with, but I chose to ignore them. And so at the fourth round of layoffs in the UK, where they decided to layoff 25% of the people in my department, after a previous 3 sets of 10% each, I got caught and was out looking for another job.

As a kind of postscript to this, I am not unhappy about leaving Sun, only unhappy about ignoring the signs and not getting out sooner. As a result of this I have found a better job, which I find much more interesting and fulfilling than any of the stuff that I was doing at Sun. Really, when you see the signs that things are not right, whether it be bad company direction as in my examples, or working for a bad manager, or not getting recognition, or any other sign, it is really an opportunity to get out of that bad job and company and find a far better one. By delaying the point at which I left Sun, I was really missing out on an opportunity to look for a better job and take it when I found it. I was choosing to be blind to the impending crash, and when it happened I had to react quickly. But it was definitely the right thing to have happened.

Sun - Still Sinking

2006-03-30T20:33:00.000+01:00

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."

Sybase Monitoring Tables (1)

2006-03-16T15:04:00.000Z

Sybase has introduced a set of monitoring tables with ASE 12.5.0.3 (aka. the MDA tables). As someone new to Sybase, I found these tables to be very similar to the V$ tables of Oracle. They both essentially provide a real time view onto in memory data structures using the relational database table metaphor, so that you can use SQL itself to query what the database is up to at a given point in time.

The first point is how similar these two features are conceptually. They both contain similar tables with similar sets of data:

Currently connected sessions - V$SESSION vs monProcess
Currently executing SQL Statements - V$SQL vs monProcessSQLText
Events occuring - V$SYSSTAT vs monSysWaits
Per session waits for events - V$SESSION_EVENT vs monProcessWaits
Currently locked objects - V$LOCK vs monLocks
Memory cache of data blocks - V$BUFFER_POOL_STATISTICS vs monCachePool

There are of course differences between the two features, and I am not attempting to say that the Sybase one is equivalent to the Oracle one. It is just interesting to note that Oracle has had the V$ tables for many years, and Sybase has recently introduced a new feature that ends up seeming very similar in principle. Is this a case of convergent behaviour? Is a real time view onto in memory structures the ultimate way to go for performance monitoring?

Given that Sybase has recently introduced these, and that they seem similar to the V$ tables of Oracle, which Oracle has had for many years, it seems natural to try and use them to investigate what a system is doing. Here, of course, is where you come up against the differences between the two products and their approach to these features.

For instance, the Oracle V$SQL view contains all recently executed SQL statements, including a count for the number of executions and other statistics. The key point is that it still contains data on old, previously executed SQL statements. They remain accessible to V$SQL until their entry is reused for another SQL statement. However, the Sybase monProcessSQLStatement and monProcessSQLText views only contain currently executing SQL statements. Which is fine to a point, but does not let you see what anything was recently executing or how frequently.

However, using a snapshotting technique similar to that used in STATSPACK for Oracle, you can easily record the contents of these Sybase monitoring tables over an extended period of time, and then later analyse them to see what your system was up to.

Using this I have been able to investigate some slowly performing Sybase applications, and detect things like resource contention. The benefit of this approach is that you capture the data all the time, and analyse it at your leisure later. If you tried to use these monitoring tables directly, the danger is that by the time you spot a problem the situation has changed, and the data related to that problem is no longer visible in these real time tables.

Sun's Strategy and Future

2005-12-22T14:32:00.000Z

While researching some references for my previous blog on Sun's strategy, or lack of, I came across this great BusinessWeek article on Sun and Scott McNealy -
Sun: A CEO's Last Stand.
As I read through the article, I found that they were making many of the same points that I believed about Sun's off target strategy and the potentially disastrous consequences of them for Sun's future. And these points were backed up by interviews with many previous Sun executives.

The main points I fully agreed with were:

McNealy's refusal to acknowledge the depth of the downturn in server sales, and to take appropriate action to right size the company. Instead of a one-off large correction, Sun is slowly suffering death by a thousand small cuts.

The departure of almost all of the top executives, because McNealy would not take the right actions at the right time to keep Sun a viable, focussed company.

Trying to compete against both Dell and IBM at the same time - offering both mass produced, high volume, low cost entry level servers, and also massively scalable, highly engineered, high performance mainframe class servers. They both have different economic models, and you cannot do them both well at the same time.

The high cost of the R&D for all of the many different products Sun has. Processors, servers, storage, thin clients, Solaris, Java, identity management, office productivity, and on and on.

Revenues over 33% off their peaks of 4 years ago - $11 billion from $18 billion. But no corresponding change in the cost structure of the company.

The mistake of not adopting Intel processors sooner, and missing out as that market grew and grew.

The mistake of buying Cobalt, and then practically destroying it by hampering its ability to produce new products.

Well worth a read.

Sun's Strategy - What Strategy?

2005-12-22T12:19:00.000Z

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.

Niagara - Saving Sun or Sinking It?

2005-12-07T20:30:00.000Z

So Sun has finally announced servers based on the Niagara multi-threaded, multi-core CPU. Officially it is the
UltraSPARC T1 processor,
in the
T1000 and
T2000 servers.

At one level I think the whole Niagara/T1 chip multi-threaded (CMT) stuff that Sun has done is great, if not phenomenal. They have managed to design and build a processor that delivers more throughput in total, while not consuming any more resources to achieve it.
And they have done it in a way that deals with the memory latency that slows down the performance of normal single threaded processors.
The T1 should definitely deliver more overall performance per core than a single threaded
processor, and with 8 simpler cores packed together on one physical chip sharing related
infrastructure, it will deliver phenomenal amounts of processing power at very low cost.
And Sun should sell a lot of T1 based systems as a result.

But that leads to my other reaction - that Niagara/T1 could spell a major decline in Sun's revenues.
Why?
Because it is so cheap and yet has the equivalent power of
an E10000 system with 32 UltraSPARC-II processors in it.
So overnight a lot (but not all) of Sun's medium to high end server revenue,
based on its UltraSPARC-III and IV processors will disappear,
and will be replaced by sales of the T1000 and T2000.

Think about it. An 8 core T1 can have 32 executing threads.
Each core is equivalent to about an UltraSPARC-III (US-III) in terms of its technology and speed.
Even if a T1 does not achieve 32 times a single US-III CPU, it should achieve at least 16 times in terms of real throughput.
So EVERY 16 CPU US-III system out there could be replaced by a T1 based system!
That would have been a Sun Fire 6800 system when the US-III was first launched, costing several hundred thousand dollars.
And now it can be replaced by something costing between ten and thirty thousand dollars.
That is a major shift in the scales of revenues!

Furthermore, 16 US-III is equivalent to 8 US-IV dual core processors.
So every system from the V890 downwards can each be replaced by a single T1 based system instead. And most E2900 system sales too, as this can only hold up to 12 US-IV processors.
So, all of the revenue streams from all of the V890, V490, V440, V240 and V210 systems will just dry up. And very quickly.

The prices for these existing systems range from $118,995 for a 8 US-IV CPU, 32 GB V890, through
$80,995 for a 4 US-IV CPU, 32 GB V490,
and $40,995 for a 4 US-IIIi CPU, 32 GB V440,
to below $10,000 for the V240 and V210.

And the T1000 costs $11,995 for an 8 core, 16 GB configuration, and the T2000 costs
$26,995 for an 8 core, 32 GB configuration.

Do the math. Systems currently selling for between $50,000 and $100,000 will all be replaced by systems selling for between $12,000 and $27,000. The revenue Sun gets for this class of system will drop to roughly a quarter of its current revenue.

This means that at the high end, in practical terms, Sun will be left with the E6900, E20K and E25K only. And suddenly, compared to the T1 based systems, they look VERY expensive for the amount of processing power they deliver.

And if you are using application software that can be partitioned over a cluster, such as Oracle RAC, then you could replace an E6900 or E20K with a cluster of 4 * T2000 servers.
And Sun is saying that
Oracle will recognise a T1 processor as 2 CPUs for licensing its software. [Scroll down to the paragraph starting "Continuing to build on their longstanding collaboration"]

Let's say that 16 US-IV CPUs today equals 32 or more of the original US-III CPUs.
And one 8 core T1 processor = 32 threads = 16 US-IIIs at worst performance.
Then 4 * T1 = 64 US-IIIs presuming linear scaling when clustered.
But, given that Oracle RAC will not scale linearily, we might only get 3 times
the throughput of one T2000 system.
The net result is that the cluster of 4 * T2000 servers gives me around 48 US-IIIs worth of processing power, which is more than a server with 16 US-IV CPUs in it.

So a 16 US-IV CPU 64 GB E20K at
$905,142 could be replaced by 4 * T2000 of 8 core, 32 Gb each at 4 *
$26,995 = $107,980.
This represents a saving of $797,162, or 88% of the price of the E20K!

I imagine that Sun's figures for Q1 of calendar year 2006 will not look very good.
Great server volumes, but lousy revenues, and therefore lousy profit (if any).
Again, do the maths yourself. As a consumer, the T1 based T1000 and T2000 are great products.
Tremendous amounts of processing power for very little money,
and fully binary compatible for running Solaris 10 and all of the ISV applications already out there.
As a shareholder, just how does Sun expect to grow its revenue, and as a result
cover its costs and so make a profit?
I don't know. And I don't believe Scott or Jonathan know either.
Otherwise they would have fixed the revenue / profit problem a long time ago,
and Sun wouldn't be in the mess it is in now.