Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Sun further commits to open source Java
>
I didn't know they spent that much on research. Just trim that and
you'd see them pole-vaulting into profitability (although letting go
some of their 35,000 employees sure would also help)
Interesting blog about Sun:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=3063
when you've got an executive on stage that oversees a $2 billion per
year hardcore IT R&D budget in front of a hardcore IT audience, then
might be a good time to ask that executive to walk through the Top 10
highlights of that budget and why those highlights might be relevant to
the way an IT strategist should be thinking.
Sun could very easily pare back its R&D and interest in developers and
become more of a commodities player like a Dell or an HP. Not that
those companies don't have R&D budgets of their own. But the two are
in a blood bath for marketshare in what are clearly commodity markets.
If you're like Dell or HP and have figured out how to squeeze a
respectable profit out of such a low-margin business, then there's no
shame in being in those wars. With its Opteron-based servers, Sun is
actually in one of those wars. But the fact of the matter is that
neither Moore's Law nor the Internet work in favor of these particular
commodity markets.
Is Sun's $2 billion per year too big? Is there some fat on the bones
that needs trimming? In the press conference after the drubbing he took
from McGuckin and Plummer, Schwartz admitted as much and said that, as
chief executive, it was now one of his top priorities to work with
CTO/R&D EVP Greg Papadopoulos to make sure that Sun's R&D investments
are well aligned with the company's business strategy. That said, R&D
is like venture capital. I don't know what the industry standard
success/failure ratio for venture capital is, but I do know that you
can't hit an R&D homerun like Java without striking out a bunch of
times.
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