Sun undershoots again Sun has been hit by the recession and thinks its quarterly earnings to end-September will be below estimates. Its goodwill may have to be written down too. Wall Street anticipated quarterly revenues of $3.143bn for Sun's first fiscal 2009 quarter. The company thinks it will report $2.95bn - $3.05bn. Wachovia analyst Aaron …
Ah, now I finally understand - it's a cunning strategy to drive down the share price to such a low level that they can hoover up all the shares with their fat wad of green. Kind of like a management buyout but without the management. But then if Sun owns all of Sun, then who owns Sun? Color me confused.
Scott ("Screw meeting the European staff, where's the golf course") MacNealy was always banging on about Sun's $5bn in the bank when I worked for Sun back in the 90's.
So in all this time they couldn't even accrue a decent amount of interest on it?
(and I've never understood why Jonathan 'Soapbox' Schwartz got to take over, when all he's ever done is stood up in front of anyone who would listen to his loud arse while he droned on about how techie and clever he thinks he is......I got sick of deleting all his "latest thoughts" bloody internal email monologues)
They only have themselves to blame for their slow decline - they have a great hardware and system in the form of SPARC , but would they price the desktop systems competitively with X86 PCs even when the writing was appearing on the wall in big neon letters? Would they hell. No they happily carried on charging thousands of quid for underspecced machines simply for the priviledge of having a Sun label on them. Unfortunately reality caught up , Linux and x86 kicked their arses and the rest is history - Sun desktop sparc systems are no more and they're desperately trying to flog rebadged PCs for the desktop now, but because linux is gaining such a foothold the desktop is lost to that and Windows and Sun is under threat on the server room too because people rightly think "hey, why not just use one architecture desktop and server room?"
Its a shame but the usual story - great engineers , idiotic and greedy management who couldn't see further than the next accounting year. Expect Sun to go the way of DEC and Silicon Graphics within 10 years.
"Developoment projects are disappearing faster than a bankers bonus....." Actually, I'm seeing a rash of managers desperate to SPEND budget before year end in case it gets taken away from them in the new budget, so I'm seeing projects being brought forward and even new projects being quickly invented to create budget sinkholes! Unfortunately (for Sun), this short-term blip doesn't include any Sun solutions, but I expect it will mean a dip in activity for all vendors in the new budget year unless the economy bounces back quickly.
"....Sun should benefit from a hardware renewal cycle for all those legacy systems..." From conversations with chums in other companies I've worked out the average enterprise solution - mostly designed for three year lifecycles - seem now to be stretched to six plus years, which must be hurting all the UNIX vendors. Instead of swapping out old RISC systems for nice new tin, companies are finding ways to keep the old ones chugging along instead. It''s actually good news for some people - a contact at a broker is making a killing sourcing old RISC system spares and upgrades, so he's actually hoping for the downturn to stay!
Where the downturn is good news for Sunshiners is that all those old legacy SPARC apps will likely not be upgraded or migrated to other platforms for a while, so there will be some work available for all the Sunshiners when they get pink slips from Schwartz.
Sun used to announce the day after IBM when times were good. Now they are over two weeks later for a company 10th the size. I know they have to use slow Sparc systems to do their financial close, but this is ridiculous.
I guess those IBM systems are 4-6 times faster than Sun systems.
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