08/14/2009 09:40:10 AM EST

Roth is partially correct. The once proud company was ruined by business-retard Schwartz and his gang of incompetents. The Sun stopped innovating is the day the company died, and that day corresponds with the day Schwartz took over.

United StatesMaybe

08/15/2009 04:55:24 AM EST

Roth is not correct when he states that the acquisition of Storagetek was "not a failure" .. it was ... ! STK was turning 10% Net Income year after year when Sun bought the company and Sun was loosing loosing money ... and what happened ? Not a single executive bothered to see what was the management structure that generated such a result. Sun treated former STK employees and executives with contempt and laid off almost everyone in the next 3 years. Sun main failure was to think that it hold the truth to everyting and did not need to learn from others. Whilst the company was piling layer over layer of people intervening in everything but responsible for not much, people were not talking to each other, everyone narrowingly concentrated on its own little patch totally ignoring the others .. High IQ and presentation skills is not enough to run a company .. any B school graduate can design a strategy plan .. the real problem is in execution where Sun top execs lamentably failed.

FranceJean-Marc Chwialkowski

08/16/2009 09:21:16 AM EST

Sorry, Maybe. I can't agree. Sun was into navel-gazing back in the 90s in an insanely self-destructive way. Remember Sun's firewall and Novell IPX-IP gateways, the Netras, etc.? They were releasing them unfinished with horrifically bad administrative interfaces and full of show-stopper bugs. Did they fix them? Did they, hell! As a good example, the IP to IPX gateway got dropped almost before they even shipped the product. Sun was consistently releasing product that was pure crap and telling its customers, and just as importantly, itself that it was a market leader in all these markets. It was simply terrible at shipping product that worked. More examples: Cobalt RAQ, Javastations, mail systems. 143Mhz UltraSPARC workstations for $7000 in an era of the 500Mhz Pentium II. This article is spot on. And kudos for telling the truth.

CanadaSteve

08/17/2009 02:27:25 PM EST

Without internal innovation, your firm is toast. It is a constant battle between the "If you don't obsolete yourself, your competition will" and "There comes a time in every project where you have to shoot the engineer and go to market". The former (innovate) will grow your company and share price. The latter (stagnate) will give you a couple of great quarters to pump up that bonus and golden parachute. So if you don't have technical cojones (technical term), don't join the management team or board of a high tech company. Sign on with a food company where all you have to worry about is not having a salmonella outbreak.

United StatesTom Mariner

08/17/2009 11:54:18 PM EST

Hubris doesn't begin to describe Sun. They were messianic. In 1992 I was a true believer. I thought SPARC would take over the world. It was an "open" platform! It was RISC! The scales fell from my eyes when Sun killed off Solbourne computer by raising the license fees. Yes...SPARC was only open as long as no one threatened Sun's revenue stream. I crossed over to Microsoft technologies and never looked back.

United StatesBob Rundle