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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: shlurker who wrote (63219)	7/31/2005 7:08:02 PM
From: E_K_S	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Here are the "four mistakes" - I hope they are all fixed now. (http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=P11276_0_1_0_C) From the link above:"... McNealy: I'll tell you my four mistakes. Hiring too many people—by the way, my big mistake was not having the right people who did the right things. But I let hiring happen. Two, I let the landlords take a huge big bag of cash out of this company. We're still paying leases. We went from 16 million to 10 million square feet. I can deal with five. The third thing is we lost touch with the customer and quality products. We just weren't focused, so we got a little bit of a hangover. But the customer just said "Hey, your stuff doesn't work" and I got no orders to fill. We fixed that. We fixed that over the last three or four years, and now we're back to where we were pre-bubble, in terms of quality. The fourth thing is I screwed up the x86 thing. I listened a little bit to the folks who said "Sparc can do everything." It can't. It can do some things that x86 can't do, and maybe won't be able to do them for a long, long time, with scalability up and all the rest of it. But we said, "We'll take care of the x86 space by doing it software-only." My stupid logic was that by doing software-only, IBM, HP, and Dell would be more willing to OEM it, because we weren't trying to take the hardware dollars from them. Well, because Microsoft doesn't do hardware, it was okay to resell, and then support Microsoft. It turns out that they all had their reasons for not doing—like Dell had a special deal with Microsoft to not do Solaris. HP and IBM, we were their number one competitors in the server space and they were going to do nothing to support us. So we didn't get the apps. We didn't get the apps and we didn't get the customers. You don't get the customers, you can't do the R&D and promotion. We were doing 360s in the mud. It was only in the last two or three years when we decided to really go crazy with our own general-purpose x86 hardware and then get Andy back. And now all of a sudden we're leading the parade in the x64 market. By this summer we'll have 500 non-Sun computers certified for Solaris, and in the old days we couldn't get anybody to do it. Only when we entered the market, irritated the market, and they went "Oh my gosh, Sun's going to own the Solaris x86 market!" and then you see the downloads. So those were the four big mistakes: real estate, people—we're still digging out from under those. The quality issue is done, fixed, but we got a little bit of a hangover with the customer, rightfully so. And then the x86 thing, which has just taken off like a rocket. Schwartz: Maybe I'd add one other mistake on to that, which is that we didn't open source Solaris sooner. And we should have done it, because fundamentally the biggest innovation that Linux offered was that it ran on x86...." EKS