Sun Microsystems.

Sun Microsystems – an Rx for survival.

April 25, 2005.

In the heady days of the dot-com boom, Sun proclaimed that they were the “dot” in the dot-com. I used to quip “they’d better want to be the com in the dot-com”. Jokes in which Scott McNealy was compared to god were not uncommon, Indian programmers who could write a program to make a computer print “hello world” – could get a VW Beetle as a sign-on bonus to be the next great Web-Master. Blodget proclaimed that Amazon was a $400 stock – and it soon was! Yahoo had a market value in excess of the entire semiconductor industry’s [sans Intel and Motorola].

The boom also converted Sun from a purveyor to the tech pinheads who needed workstations to write programs and build chips – to a company that sold the infrastructure components of a network [web-server hardware and software]. Also, Sun was selling a lot of product that used Intel’s CPU’s – in addition to their proprietary SPARC-based boxes.

SPARC started out as an interesting competition to Intel’s x86 architecture, but by the mid-90’s every company that once tried to make SPARC chips – with the exception of Sun themselves, had ceased to do so [Cypress, Ross Tech, Fujitsu] – since Intel had won the CPU race so convincingly, and none of the names mentioned above profited significantly from SPARC sales.

Today, it is not sufficient for a CPU architecture to just be the “brains” of a computer box. A company that spends $$$$ designing a CPU must leverage it for use in embedded computing. Examples of embedded computing include game consoles, automotive [electronic ignition, ABS], and print engines. All CPU architectures - with the exception of SPARC, find their way into multiple embedded applications [which is exactly why Arm Holdings has been successful to date].

Getting to the point, my Rx for Sun’s survival is simple. Close the SPARC division, give up designing chips and use Intel’s CPU’s [much the same thing that Silicon Graphics did in order to survive] – or, spin off the SPARC division and see if they can survive [a-la MIPS]. This gets Sun out of the highly capital intensive and competitive chip-design market [which is not Sun’s core area of competence].

Sun can then focus on what they are good at – building software and hardware for web-services, network infrastructure, Solaris; and compete in the services sector [with IBM].

Copyright Bapcha, April 25, 2005.