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From the Editors: Time’s up for Sun’s CEO


By SD Times News Team
December 15, 2008 — 
If we were to start a company today and needed a terrific CTO or a spectacular corporate strategist, Jonathan Schwartz would be a prime candidate. He has shown repeatedly that he understands technology and can establish great plans. He’s a rare breed: a consummate engineer who’s comfortable speaking in public.

But as Sun’s revenue slides and the company undertakes yet another round of layoffs, Schwartz’s communication skills and technological vision are not enough to warrant his remaining at the helm of the industry’s most consistently troubled large hardware and software vendor.

Sun is still not sure what it wants to be. In days past, it was a hardware vendor, selling server boxes powered by its own chips. They were reliable, powerful, unique and expensive. Today, Sun sells all manner of hardware, with processors from the chip giants as well as its own SPARC chips. The uniqueness is gone; they’re still expensive. Meanwhile, Sun is still betting on Solaris, which continues to seek its level in a Linux-dominated open-source world, and on its Java business, which the company says is profitable but is clearly being pressed by Microsoft’s .NET.

Sun’s board needs to wake up and realize that Schwartz is no longer the right man for the CEO job. Sun needs someone who is half ombudsman and half used-car salesman. Someone like Mark Hurd, who pulled Hewlett-Packard back from the brink by putting sales above all else.

Instead, Sun is becoming a life-support system for billions of dollars in research, with the resultant technologies productized and pushed out the door to a puzzled or indifferent marketplace.

Seemingly every month, the company introduces some wonderful new technology that languishes for a while, as people try to understand its place in the landscape, until a Java partner or competitor spins its own implementation and gains traction—and profit. In the Java application server market, BEA, IBM and others took Sun’s concept and ran with it. In Java tools, Sun’s Forte lineup and NetBeans project were eclipsed by Borland, IBM Rational and a host of others. In the cloud space, Amazon leads the charge, despite Sun’s having offered its own grid-on-demand services for almost six years now.

Sun is good at creating technologies; it’s just not good at profiting from them. Schwartz is a brilliant technologist. It’s unfortunate that he’s not a brilliant salesman, too.

Agile in bloom
Development managers once believed that adherence to rigid processes was the best way to deliver software relatively error-free and on time. But the emergence of lighter, less process-intensive development methodologies under the agile umbrella has shown that better software can be delivered when developers are allowed to “go with the flow” of changing requirements and advancing the code every day.

Last month’s QCon conference, with Agile Manifesto signatories Martin Fowler and Kent Beck among the keynote speakers, put the spotlight squarely on agile methods.

Radical change has come to software development. No longer are most organizations building monolithic applications with eight-month release cycles, where strict governance protects the codebase, requirements are gathered upfront and locked down, and important features are put off until the next revision, lest they blow up the delivery schedule.

Now it’s about building applications from composite pieces, tapping existing open-source code and calling out to services to perform business-driven tasks. The term tossed about at QCon was domain-driven development. To us, that means “whatever process works for you in your domain.”

Developers should be happy, since this creates headroom for creative problem-solving and true collaboration, harking back to why many got into the business in the first place. And companies will get work done.

Managers, if you’re trying to cram your development into a process that doesn’t fit your group, you should lose the process, not the project.


Related Search Term(s): agile, cloud computing, Java, software development, Sun


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