Sun: The GM Of IT

I cringed on reading the news that Sun is slashing upward of 5,000 jobs. For me, it's sad proof that Sun has turned into the GM of IT: a beached whale, too big for its own good, that will now be picked to death mercilessly by scavengers.

If this sounds like a 180° reversal from my previous post about Sun -- well, yes it is. There, I was holding out hope that by fusing its top-notch hardware designs with open source software layers it would be able to create a product line to sustain it for years to come. Now I fear all of that has come far too late to matter.

My parallel with GM was influenced by Thomas Friedman's recent New York Times op-ed column, where he expresses his stupefaction with the way the U.S. auto industry essentially painted itself into a corner, and may only be able to leave the room by knocking a hole in the wall. The parallels are not exact, but for me they're there: Sun made its business by building big iron to the point where it became overly dependent on it, the way the domestic car companies stuck with fuel-inefficient designs that didn't give them any room to weather downturns.

So if Sun burns out, what happens to its flagship open source offerings? MySQL AB and the OpenOffice.org project both ought to be able to find future supporters -- maybe IBM for the latter (especially now that Lotus Symphony is out) and someone already stable and profitable for the former. OpenSolaris's fate would be more troubling. Maybe someone who does existing work with big iron, doesn't have an OS offering, and isn't in major trouble (Fujitsu, maybe?) would be willing to pick them up -- but "maybe" is a bad word to use for the fate of anything of that size.

What sliver of hope I retain about Sun follows these lines: It pares down, painfully, and also tries to figure out how to maintain profitability by adding some more diversity to its existing hardware line. I could see, for instance, a home media server along the lines of HP's Windows Server-powered box -- even if the profit margins on something like that would be too thin for its blood. Right now, though, it can't afford to be finicky.

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