Where does Sun Microsystems belong?
Just the question I was asking myself yesterday. Certainly, they have a very strong position with their servers, especially re the Internet, but also a lot of strong challengers there, from the Intel crowd in particular, and nothing beyond the overall quality of Sparc to provide them with an intrinsic advantage.
And Java, while it is certainly important to the industry, is a questionable contributor to Sun's bottom line. They clearly have been successful in achieving broad adoption and tornado like growth in use, but they haven't achieved a dominant role in doing anything related to that adoption that actually brings in money.
There may well be the seeds of this changing with the Forte acquisition since it is clear that the FJEE toolset is far enough ahead of the competition on meeting goals for Java for the enterprise, i.e., J2EE, as to constitute a discontinuous innovation. If they are successful in tailoring NetBeans so as to create continuity between that as the baby starter version and FJEE as the enterprise version, it could be very exciting indeed.
Moreover, in terms of the overall thrust of being the one-stop shop for Internet applications, many companies, particularly larger ones, find themselves with an EAI project connecting their legacy apps with the new Internet presence... and Forte has the top solution there too.
So, in terms of the software side and the one-stop shopping position, it would seem that Sun was more in the position of having created a new tornado which it is just entering. |
