So, let me get this straight, third quarter revenues dropped 1/200th. half a percent. 38 milion in the red to a company that ticks over 3 billion a year in revenue.

and a reasonably policy to address this is to sack 1.5 to 2.5 thousand people? for a revenue drop overall of less than a tenth of a percent?

wow. I would LOVE to meet the beancounter that justifies that kind of reasoning.

I can think of 1.5 to 2.5 thousand people that would like to b^Hmeet him as well...

Just imagine what it is like working for a company that has endless lay-offs. Never sure where the axe is going to fall, not being able to plan any future home expenditure in case it is me.

Sun bought StorageTek and effectively raped what was a good company, will they do the same to MySQL?

Just hope I can make it to retirement.....

And this is not just a comment about Sun, this seems to apply across the board. The management make the plans, but they rarely seem to take the fall when things go wrong. I was amazed recently when a Japanese company we work with had a whole management team resign as their project had failed and they all thought it was the correct thing to do. In the UK, a similar project failure would have led to a blamestorming session and the removal of anyone but management.

"Sun is run by clueless loons and has been for ten years now."

In my experience, most North American tech companies are run by oxygen-thieving idiots so there's no need to single Sun out in this respect. There's a certain degree of truth in the theory that the higher one is up the corporate scrotum pole, the less capable one is of making a decision. So it goes.

Want to throw HR a curve? Ask for voluntary redundancy - worth it just to see the looks on their faces. Best decision I ever made, with the benefit of hindsight.

NOT performing layoffs?

Let's change our Ticker to JAVA

Let's do a 4 for 1 stock reversal

Let's give up on SPARC above 4 chips and just resell Fujitsu

Let's pretend the ROCK chip is nirvana and wont be canceled before 2010.

Hmm....things to cut

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSuLMhTnuMc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUdFqW7vRc0&eurl=http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/

Get serious guys.... revenue and profit = a future and your future is looking like a drooling April fools joke

the internal mails today told us…

- its due to the US economy

- “we” did all we could - “we” are good

- IBIS ( the oracle CRM system which has proved to be the ultimate disaster) had not impact

- Jonathan “I’m disappointed”… so to satisfy my ego I will sack 2500 people

- and we keep having more levels of management between ground floor and ivory tower == ponytail

- the big fear here is that Donald Grantham will once again not be able to make a decision.. and will simply cut 7.5% of all departments… hence making more and more departments/software utter crap instead of cutting off the real crap and saving the gems - yes Sun stil has gems… but management does not seem to realize this…. nor do they care as long as their personal bonus is paid out

its time for a revolution... and Mr ponytail, grantham and the likes should be put against the wall.....

Sun has good stuff... software and hardware... but it's (over)time to sack the money grabbers and get Sun back on track.... leading in development

Is Mr. "No one _still_ working at Sun calls me ponytail boy" Schwartz to blame? No more than any of the other top executives there. Like many, who rose too quickly, Jonathan is a victim of his own success. He believes that he really is smarter than just about everyone else, rather than realizing that he is just very lucky to be where he is.

There are a ton of things wrong with Sun, and fewer things going right. As for Sun's overall strategy, they do have a clue, but really don't know how to execute. Sun has never really been about execution. They've relied on being lucky and having the hot product at the right time. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.

Their chip strategy is tenuous at best, their software strategy could pay-off long term, they just don't have a clue how to monetize the transition from proprietary software to open-source and paid support services. As for their storage 'strategy' well, Sun's never had a clue and continually show their naïveté. Their recent announcement (covered in the Register) about “developer tools” for turning a Solaris system into a storage appliance using ZFS is just laughable. Even if they are successful in killing their competitors’ storage profits, Sun has no plan for how they can make money.

However, Sun's real problems all stem (IMHO) from their culture of "be different", "engineers rule" and "If we didn't invent it, deride it". In my experience this type of culture rarely changes unless the board goes for a total shakeup. This can and does occur, ala IBM with Lew Gerstner in the early 90's. Though with Sun's board bought and paid for by My Sun himself (one Scott 'turrets syndrome' McNealy), a board induced turnover is unlikely.

The more likely scenario is to die a slow and painful death by 1,000 cuts as Sun slowly dwindles like former rivals Novell and SGI have done. It looks like this Sun won’t go nova anytime soon, instead it’s looking more like a brown dwarf.