From the Editors: Time’s up for Sun’s CEO
By SD Times News Team
December 15, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 2)
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.
Related Search Term(s): agile, cloud computing, Java, software development, Sun
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