Simon Phipps comments on Oracle’s decision to close down the SPARC and Solaris business units. He was close to the politics of Sun’s “Dash to Open” in the mid noughties. My feeling is that Sun had failed before Schwartz was appointed; there was no longer room for differentiated hardware company; Oracle’s failure to monetise the SPARC product line may have been caused by management hubris, but the long term economics …
returned to software migration/porting recently due to having been part of the team that wrote Migrating to Solaris OS due to some of the projects I had worked in. We argued that there were four basic techniques available, this article lists and briefly reviews them and looks at the economic constraints to migration. …
Mike Ramchand has published a blog article about deploying a clustered pair of virtual box containers on a Solaris host. I am rather impressed. …
Last month, just before travelling to the West Coast, I practised my latest presentation,”Six reasons to choose Solaris”, in which I have a slide with some company logos of the users of Solaris 10. One of my audience asked why Google wasn’t on the slide …
Steve Wilson led a presentation about the changing nature of Sun’s connected customer response and where the provisioning and image maintenance tools now sit. This means that he’s responsible for network support, subscription services and what’s left of our N1 management suite. …
Brian Wong, one of Sun’s Distinguished Engineers spoke this morning and stated categorically that the “Storage [Market] is right to be disrupted”. He argued that the general purpose OS (such as Solaris) offers massive developer economies of scale, by which we mean operating system developer economics. …
Jeff Jackson, VP of Solaris opened our conference. He’s now been in the job for a while and is beginning to stamp his own ideas on the future of Sun’s implementation of OpenSolaris. He characterised his view as moving from function to velocity; velocity has a direction. He wants Solaris releases to meet a customer constituency rather than become the result of a race between his developers. …
After mixing it in a conversation about what Solaris needs to make me use it as my Laptop operating system of choice I was persuaded to trash my Linux build (Fedora 3.5) which was broken and unusable anyway, mainly because the update manager was completely shagged. (I’m in good company, see Eric Raymond’s goodbye to Red Hat). …
Sun had a customer jamboree today, and I documented my attendance on my Sun Oracle blog in a couple of articles, covering sustainability, teleworking & productivity, James Gosling on Java and CPU architecure, design and specialisation and the nature of innovation. …
I wrote a piece about Sun’s short term future based on two pieces of optimism. The first was a third quarter of revenue growth, and a first of profitability for a while, the second was the hope that the systems market would permit competition through differentiation. I said, “At Sun’ we’ve just returned to profitability with our third quarter of revenue growth in a row and as some very famous economist said, three data points are a trend. One of the insights underpinning our strategy is that Sun innovates and monetises intellectual property. …