Welcome to... GingerCat Software
We make software for the Web the Macintosh and linux
(among other things!) We hope you enjoy our site
Blog | New Site
|
What to do with Sun Microsystems! There has been a whole lot of noise on the Internet lately about the sale of Sun Microsystems - it seems sad that this once dynamic company has become another dollar hemorrhaging Goliath that can not get it together! So I am going to put on my pundit hat today and offer my 2 cents worth. What to do with Sun Microsystems! The first thing they need to do is realize that they are a computer company - and they need to get off their ass and sell as many of these darn things as they can. Currently they have far to many machines and varieties of machine and bits of software to play with and to chose from! They need to focus and remember that they have a brand. That brand was about great servers. That was there business, and it still should be. But the server market has changed - guess who has probably more servers than anyone? Yep Google. And what is interesting is that these machines are not huge expensive hunks of iron - they are cheep off the shelf boxes that they can glue together to create the monster that is Google! So what could Sun learn from this? Well they could try to make a machine that can be configured off the shelf with LAMP dns email and file serving within an hour - 30 minutes would be good and they need to sell that box with this software on it now for a very low price! The crazy thing is that from a software angle they used to have such a product it was called called Cobalt and they brought that company for about 2 Billion. You could do just about all of the above with Cobalt - all via a web interface it was very very impressive! What happened to Cobalt? well it went the way of many amazing projects that are purchased by big companies. It was parked in a corner and left unloved and has been discontinued. I knew it was only a matter of time before this happened - one of the first things they did was to build a rack version of the cube (which was a good idea) then they punched up the price. But I digress! The physical design of this machine should be 1U by about 10 inches and it needs to run very quietly - it may be the box that sits under an IT managers desk (or better still in every geeks bedroom) or in the lobby of the company - this box that they build needs to be visually stunning and appealing (People at SUN it is not just a box of chips it is something people have to visually connect with and live with) this can be achieved with good simple design (or even with a bright coat of paint!) and it need not to cost much. They then need to build a version 2 of this box that can be useed to augment this core model - it would be fitted with all the above mentioned software that could be used to expand the basic install of the 1st mentioned machine (so that when that 1 st server starts to groan - it is as simple as purchasing another big of lego to expand it!) it needs to be priced so that Google would seriously consider plunking down an order for some of these. This is not rocket science - Sun is no longer a small company but as I think Coco Chanel said - "I only started to make money when I sold to the girl in the street". They still have massive brand presence - they just need to reorganize and use all that technology in a way that would make me want to give up my linux box because what they built was the same price only better! 
|
