Techtonicbull
I don't think the facts support your reasoning here.
1) You said: "Buyers of high range hardware are >finding alternatives to the high margin Sun Micro equipment. There is no reason for them to pony up the money for the incremental increases in speed that SUNW always crows about."
The market share numbers don't seem to indicate customers are abandoning Sunw for alternative. Latest numbers from IDC suggest the opposite, market share gains for sunw across the board high medium and low end. This is inspite of the fact that the mostly high end buyers of technology are not buying a thing. We are talking about new verticals and new customers moving to Sunw.
2) You said: " Also SUNW's storage and general software isn't so "hot" as compared to Microsoft or in the UNIX space LINUX is the place to be for Big "iron". IBM is promoting it like mad now. "
First of all, IBM's Linux is not the same open source linux that you get off the web. They have changed it significantly. Look at the Linux source code and you will agree that no commercial product has ever shipped with such low quality.
About Sun's storage and other software compared to microsoft, Microsoft's does not have much presence in storage software. They will most likely acquire someone like Data Core to get into storage software. On other software, Sun's ISV partners like BEA, Oracle are market share leaders and unlikely to suddenly disappear. Microsoft still makes 80% of its revenue from two CDs, one with the label Office and other XP.
3) Finally, you said "Also, JAVA is free for all so big deal that SUNW invented it. They never controlled it. Since they never controlled JAVA, they never made any money from it."
Some would agrue with you that Sun controls Java a little too much. But to the point of making money of this technology, Java enabled the migration of applications from client heavy installations to server heavy installations. In addition, Java enables proliferation of client devices. Today you are making business decisions from your cell phone! All of this creates a huge demand for servers.
In the past few months, Sunws just entered three new markets that I could follow through reading P/R. Their acquisition of Pirus given then access to upto $4B of storage networking market. Their entry into Linux desktop caps the growth of xp workstations and keeps it out of turnkey applications like call centers. I believe Sun has initially tried to get SunRay into this market. This market itself is around $1-3B depending on how many verticals you count. Finally, their acquisition of a little know afara systems gives them technology to come up with killer blade servers. (In addition to getting Les Kohn the father of UltraSPARC back into Sun). That is another 3-4 billion market.
Sorry, but I think the recession has actually forced Sun to set itself up for its next growth phase. Its competition have made no significant changes to their models and will continue to post the same lethargic growth rates they did pre and post bubble. |
