I recently read an article that Solaris is a dead OS (or will be rather shortly). I beg to differ, proveded the hardware support is there. Solaris can still multithread better than anyone. Solaris’ ZFS is still the most superior file system available (although before the ReiserFS founder got put in prison for wasting his wife it looked poised for greatness) and the Sun hardware is still best of breed. Sun as a company is also going to be building tighter integration into MySQL, which should help boost numbers.
But the pony-tail-laden chief of Sun definitely has his work cut out for him. There are certain acquisitions that have not been smooth (cough – tape libraries) and still need to get finished up. There’s also the need to find a really good synergy between MySQL and Sun, where the Open Source community can continue to love and leverage MySQL without being forced into Sun products, but still provide a value-add from using Sun products. Hard thing to do. There’s also Java and all the services surrounding it and of course OpenSolaris, which is picking up new converts all the time – but which still lacks the trend setting aspects of Fedora and Ubuntu.
To me it seems that what Sun really needs is an identity. It really seems that there’s a lack of a cohesive vision that encompasses all of the products they have. Take NetApp as an example. They’re a storage vendor. Same with EMC – although EMC has purchased a lot of other companies, those purchases are geared towards driving storage sales. Sun just seems to be blowing around in the winds of a certain economy and IT market, both should be rectified if they are to retain their position in the IT community.
In short, Sun needs to circle the wagons, perhaps divest assets that do not work with the core and reinvest heavily into the core with the increased cash position that would provide. Sun has some of the most talented engineers in the world. They need to retain them and allow them to innovate – in much the same way that Google has allowed their engineers to innovate. Sun also needs to rebuild their sales channel from the ground up, getting away from the monolithic sales strategy and zeroing in on what helps their core – hard to do without really telling the world what your core is. I wish them all the luck, ’cause I love their products (a love that goes back to my Sparc20 days). I don’t think it’s too late, but they need to do something soon or they will end up not surviving.