Thats a fantastic write-up Zubin, just in one line "good technology but bad
marketing"
I always wished Java could do better on the desktop, but kept waiting for Java
5, 6 and now 7.
--
Satish

On Friday 31 October 2008 00:59:17 Zubin Wadia wrote:
> Negative revenue trends and net losses every quarter will hammer market
> value, regardless of the stock.
>
> As a sector, Sun is part of the tech group and investors have high
> expectations for these companies.
>
> AAPL and GOOG, for example, posted stellar quarters, but cautious guidance
> on the next quarter dampened their upside.
>
> For Sun, over the last few years, bad quarters have been the norm, not the
> exception.
>
> They are an undervalued company - but one can make that case for CSCO, INTC
> and MSFT as well.
>
> What really hurts Sun is that their strategy appears clouded. They have
> 1900 Solaris engineers, they have tons of research going on all over their
> place and most of it is above average.
>
> Assets like JAVA (which is also their stock symbol) have not been monetized
> well. It is ridiculous that IBM, BEA/Oracle, JBoss etc. have bigger
> footholds for enterprise application server deployments than Sun.
>
> In the last few years they have realized that mistake and invested in
> Glassfish, which is an excellent effort, but very late. The JRE has been
> absurdly large, making it cumbersome for people wanting to deploy Rich Apps
> on the JWS/Swing platformm.... although Java 6 Update 10 changed that....
> and Java 7 will improve it further.... again too late... the high ground
> has been lost to Silverlight, GWT and Flex.
>
> Their Forte acquisition went nowhere. Their NetBeans strategy continues to
> confuse in contrast to Eclipse, but it has some great ideas.
>
> Solaris and ZFS are superb projects, but again, open sourcing it to compete
> with Linux as a server platform came too late.
>
> Then their SPARC + X86 strategy on their servers makes their operational
> complexity higher than say.... DELL. JavaFX - going nowhere fast.... the
> list of well engineered projects executed and marketed badly is endless.
>
> They need a world-class operations person as their CEO, not a gifted nerd.
> That's where the turnaround would start.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Zubin.
>
> On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 8:44 AM, Saifi Khan <saifi.khan@...>wrote:
> > Hi all:
> >
> > Sun has
> > . annual sales of USD 14 billion
> > . vast intellectual property portfolio
> > . USD 2 billion of cash reserves
> >
> > and yet has a market cap of just USD 4 billion (stock price: $ 5.29).
> >
> > How come market cap is less than market sales ?
> > or am i missing something about Economics here ?
> >
> > An interesting article about Sun Microsystems at NYTimes.
> >
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/technology/companies/31sun.html?ref=tec
> >hnology
> >
> > thanks
> > Saifi.