Hakimoto wrote:
Sat, I meant to take pictures of the inside of the machine.
Maybe on the web or you can ftp them to me, and i'll host them...
Want a look inside!
There's lots of HP workstation photos around ... the inside is nothing special. They're like all the older HP stuff used to be - unimaginative but sturdy as hell. Nowhere near as nicely-designed as SGI's.
However, they're cheaper and they have bunches more cpu power .... damn sgi anyway. R18k. Damn them damn them damn them.
This is funny, and
so
much like what SGI did :
Borrowed from
http://www.sparcproductdirectory.com/view44.html
In the mid 1990s Sun Microsystems was a cool band. They played sweet songs like "Open Systems". They drove fast SPARC accelerated systems. And they made money for their investors. It looked like they could do no wrong.
How Did Sun Microsystems Fall from Grace?
It wasn't just that the songs got less sweet, or the hubris or the (Java) drugs. Fashions are fickle. The times changed, and the fans changed but the old rockers didn't notice or didn't seem to care.
Sun's decline was charted in many articles in the SPARC Product Directory as it happened. Here are some of the highlights.
In 1996 Sun stopped actively promoting its "SPARC" brand and instead Sun and Java became the new brands. Later when most other SPARC server companies had been driven out of business, this was taken as a sign that Sun may be playing the open systems tunes, but its real tastes were proprietary.
In 1999 Sun's star shone brightly enough that it could have killed off the fledgeling Linux market by launching its own range of Solaris x86 servers, and promoting its OS as an open source standard. But Sun clearly gave the impression that it didn't want to soil its hands with that fithy Intel hardware. Four years later, when Sun tried to go down that route. It was already well worn by others who had been there before.
In 2000 the trendy tunes in the computer market were all about network storage. Sun tried to get into that. But it had too much of a loner image to fit in with all those Intel server users. And it was too fat to squeeze in as a low cost supplier. We said it wouldn't work at the time. Sun spent hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire a new image. But what the market saw was mutton dressed as lamb. It wasn't buying.
[ ring any bells ? "SGI" logo, to the tune of fifty million $$ ? ]
In 2001 Sun got hit by a treble whammy. The dotcom generation, its biggest fans, were getting old or had passed on. And reliability problems dented the cool image of its SPARC servers. And actually when you took a closer look at those SPARC processors they didn't seem so fast any more. Sun had lost its edge.
In the next few years Sun's revenue continued to decline. Its profits disappeared. It tried to make a lame comeback by playing some newer Intel/Linux tunes. But if you looked closely at their videos you could see the group wasn't really singing at all. They had been dubbed. Sun had become a follower of fashion, and was no longer a leader. But can Sun still make a comeback?
possible answers :
Future #2 - Get the Business Consultants in and Make Sun More Profitable
This strategy would cut investment in technology and dispose of business units which were non-core. It's easy to imagine what the hatchet men would do in the case of Sun...
Exit the unprofitable Intel/Linux business. Sell off Java as a medium sized software company. Chop away at the unprofitable entry level SPARC server range. Sack 50% of the VARs and take more business directly in the mid to high end SPARC server market. Stop piddling around making the world's most expensive me-too network storage, and buy all of it in from outside.
That would work fine for about a year, and Sun could get good profits that way on 30% lower revenue and being a $5 Billion company. But what would happen after that? Cutting back on technology would mean that the company could continue being profitable for maybe another two year as the revenue trickled south to $1 Billion. In three years the company would have lost its edge, the SPARC processor line would be regarded as a joke, and the company would have a slow lingering death as a small services organization living off a customer base which was just too lazy to unplug its legacy systems.
Whatever other criticisms you may level against Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy - being parsimonious with development budgets isn't one of them. Fortunately Sun hasn't started down this route yet. But if the top management changes, it could still happen. So watch out.
