Cheryl:
Sun has achieved a strong "brand" recognition through its technical superiority, industry leadership, and the JAVA paradigm. Effective marketing and consumer education are attributes that will propel its strategic growth.
JAVA was originally conceived to be an environment for hand-held and consumer devices. In the not too distant future we'll see consumer applications based on JAVA. To that end, SUN recently bought DIBA which seem to have a niche in that area. Other applications include JAVA chips, JAVA smart cards, and embedded systems. These applications are revenue generators going forward, and will augment the revenues it will receive from JAVA licenses, NCs/JAVA stations, servers, middleware, management systems, and storage.
The business and technological climate is changing dramatically. Some of the drivers include such elements as digital convergence, ubiquitous nature of internet, improving bandwidths (faster and cheaper), increased emphasis on reducing TCO, proliferation of hand-held devices (phones, PDAs), and the business case for a thin-client. SUN can potentially chart and execute an aggressive growth strategy in this emerging environment.
To achieve this growth SUN needs to do the following:
1) Continue investments in R&D and insure return on research dollars;
2) Turn research into commercial products -- productize;
3) Focus on globalization (sales, R&D, product development);
4) Extend branding to include customer (corporate + Government), and consumer education(benefits of its products relative to the competition);
5) Prepare a mass market agenda and execute; and
6) Continue to demonstrate leadership (shape the industry standards, set direction).
I presume Scott McNealy will take this advice seriously (I understand he loves ice hockey!). |
