Comments on: Sun loss levels; acquisitions bring growth

Sun Microsystems narrows its loss, but misses expectations. Shares drop in after-hours trading.

[FutureGuy]

Scott McNealy should be fired...

Sun seems to be a company obsessed with bringing down MS. That seems to be the sole purpose of this company. It invested millions of dollars into creating software like StarOffice, not with the intention of making money, but just with the hopes to undermine another company, just plain ridiculous. Even now with its share value hovering around 3$ its main focus is derailing MS not by creating products that are better, like a better DB to compete with SQL Server and turning a profit and focusing on its core expertise in backend server business, but by creating worthless free MS office clones.
Scott is an obsessed guy, he should be fired and replaced by someone who would focus on restoring Sun to its past glory by creating excellent marketable products and return value to its investors. Otherwise at the rate Sun is loosing market cap it would end up being acquired by some other company and become its subsidiary.

[MyKbala]

Why better supported instead of fired

Hi!

Comments and complaints are of great Value for true progress, if taken into consideration :-). The thread brings up valid points, but for the sake of P from PROGRESS in my opinion Scott should be rather supported instead of fired, then the P from PROFIT will go high too. While not hired by SUN (yet), help I am aware of could double SUN's share in just one year!

When it comes to win-win games defining true Progress, you don't fire people with "vision", but rather improve that vision if you can, and/or support. Yes, good execution, marketing, RIF and how to talk to Wall Street end usually in good immediate profit. Would one really like few cents/share by a RIF leaving people w/o job? Then if Scotts' bliss is that by A LAB to usher in a Participation era where free SW is just a beginning of a tremendous progress, following such bliss may work as an invisible hand and bring in the right investors, partners, i.e. support.

What if such "invisible hand" really exists?

[publicstatic]

Fire Scott McNealy, I agree

Sun is a Lab, a big Lab. It think in Engr way, its Marketing is non-functional and in fact also in Lab mode (throwing everything on the wall and see what can stick).

Sun usually fails to produce "ready-to-use" products. Those server/soft are technically rigt but totally useless.

It always show you "vision" and failed to execute internally.

Multi-core chip ? Yes, Sun claim this idea long long ago and finally will ship out its 8corex4th chip. Let's see, AMD and Intel will ship out equally performant product at much less price soon. It'll take about 3-4 times longer before a Sun's product being recognized worthy than products from Intel/AMD/DELL. Any Sun's competitors can easily beat Sun even in "catch up" mode.

So what is the problem ? It's ability to execute.

Galaxy ? fast enough ? let's see the Market.
Solaris 10 ? big buzz ? who care ?
Java ? Hot!! Wildly used ? Where is Sun's profit ?
JES ? JokESoft ? How many "subscriber" now ?

In fact, there is no other company CEO can be so stupid to ruin so many chances to win back.

Scott! your time is up ! Get out !

[kalison1]

McNealy A Bust

Scott has never taken the steps to really get Sun out of its preolonged slump.

The company still has 8000-10000 employees too many. McNealy has never taken this step.
When the company was doing fifteen billion dollars plus in revenue it had 24000 employees.
Now it is barely doing 13b with a stupifying 35000 employees.

Field marketing was the only marketing strength the company ever had. It has been sliced to the bone and everything comes out of a know-nothing,
field-ignorant corporate marketing staff.

Ed Zander was the only marketing genius the company ever had and knew had to talk to Wall Street. McNealy couldn't ley go and let Ed run the whole company. So he left, went to Motorola, and brought them back from the moribund.

Scott needs to retire with his millions and just play ice hockey and golf.

[hutchike]

Did they get past Web 1.0 ?

Sun was crucified by the burst of the internet bubble. They took too long to reduce headcount and get into open source and X86. They continued to push Sparc/Solaris when it wasn't competing well against Linux, AIX and Windows on Dell/HP/IBM hardware.

Now things are getting better. Microsoft paid a bunch of money to settle a Java lawsuit last year. Solaris 10 is way faster with Containers and a new TCP/IP stack. JES is getting some traction with 1m subscribers ($100m/year). The Galaxy line is awesome for price/performance and performance/watt. Finally, the next generation of Sparc chips - Niagara - looks certain to inject new life into Sparc and consequenty Solaris. And then there's a secret NAS storage offering called "Honeycomb" coming out soon (we hope!).

But the bottom line is the "P" word - PROFIT. As Sun investors, we've been patient and listened to the "jam tomorrow" stories from Scott for a long long time. But now it's time to see quarter-on-quarter profitability. Scott is drinking in the last-chance saloon.