Comments on: Sun misses analyst forecasts for revenue, earnings

CEO says economic downturn has weighed on Sun's customers and hurt its high-end businesses, but says the company will be able to weather a poor economy.

[joetesta70]

Sun is still in business???

Wow. I thought they were retired in Florida with DEC, Apollo, Wang and Novell playing shuffleboard....

[Penguinisto]

Not really surprising, but damn - that's a hefty loss nonetheless.

[Mr. Dee]

Talk about needing a new lease on life. Sun, you should have OpenSource Solaris as far back as 1997, the latest being 1999. You will become even more irrelevant in the next 10 years. Linux still has a lot to catch in terms of features, robustness and scalability in addition to perception. But its becoming predictable where this company is heading. All weird things must come to an end.

[idfubar]

joetesta70 - same comment twice on two Sun stories? Get some new material man...

[joetesta70]

It's time for the CEO to get rid of his skanky ponytail. Men with ponytails look dirty, plus you can pull it off only if you are SUCCESSFUL.

[brian.lee]

The problem with Sun is that they are horrible at capitalizing on Java... Every major corporation out there uses JAVA in one form or another and a lot of enterprise software. If RedHat can make money from Linux why can't Sun make money off Java?

[Canberra-photographer]

The sun will soon go down on... well Sun. They are just too far out.

[dargon19888]

Sun needs to rethink its business model.

After e-mailing their Investor Relations and getting a pretty predictable pat answer, its clear that while they have some superior hardware technology, their marketing and positioning of the company is flawed.

While Sun will like to claim that they are a "solution provider" they are still a hardware company.

I agree that Sun has not capitalized on their Java investment, but one must look beyond Java and look at their other investments in to JavaDB/Cloudscape and MySQL.

My take is that someone will take Sun private and then refocus on their core business. Otherwise Sun will go the way of Cray and Silicon Graphics....

[hutchike]

Sun is complicated. It's like 4 separate companies. First you have the legacy big iron that's shrinking fast. Then you have the sexy new cool toys that are growing but not fast enough. There are all those Sun service consultants out there making money off support and services. And finally there's the R&D - not insignificant at $2bn per year! Taking all 4 together, you're looking at a whopping 33,000 people. Now that's just crazy. No wonder you can't make a decent profit if you're paying 33,000 people, even if you let them work from home to save on office expenses. Sun needs to cut its work force by at least 10% or it's dead within 3 years. Simple.