SUN announced that it is going to layoff 5000 employees this summer. This of course is no great surprise. If you become an ex-SUN employee in the coming months you will need to decide what to do with any stock you might have. My advice is to sell, and invest elsewhere. It's possible that you might regret it, but it's equally possible that it might be a good move.
It's not Schwartz's fault that he inherited a mess. Perhaps he is figuring out how to unravel it, but perhaps he is just trying to squeeze numbers quickly and buy himself some time. I believe SUN is an early-stage turn-around project and saying that, the odds are heavily stacked against an insider being able to do everything that is needed. Just as IBM needed Lou Gerstner, SUN needed somebody who understands business first and technology - not much. Comparing SUN to IBM in 1993 is not so damning. There is a great deal that SUN can do, if it decides to go about it in a business-like fashion.
I am an OpenOffice user and my machine runs Java like every other machine - but I didn't pay anything to get it and it hasn't inspired me to buy any SUN products. People will spend money on SUN products and services if they think those products and services have value. SUN needs to drop its popularity contest software development efforts and leverage its heritage as a data center computing company (like IBM), but it needs to make decisions without the emotional attachments of historical precedence.
A month ago I wrote my thoughts on what SUN needed to do in storage. It was the same idea - that SUN needed an outsider to take a fresh objective look at the business. Obviously, I don't have much influence there because Schwartz hired company insider David Yen for the job. Yen has an impressive resume and knows a great deal about high performance computing and probably all other aspects of computing/networking - even storage. But I don't think he will be able to build SUN storage business up from its current shambles and make a go of it. He does not appear to have any history doing that sort of thing.
So, despite it's appearances, I can't help asking if Yen's appointment isn't actually a form of demotion. Old school whiz kids like David Yen never wanted to work on storage with the knuckle draggers. What's changed? More importantly, can somebody who probably delegated storage stuff to people who delegated it to somebody else sustain the energy and emotion needed to build a business in an intense industry like storage?
I get the feeling that if I met David Yen, I would probably like him and would undoubtedly respect his knowledge. But SUN just has everything wrong when it comes to storage. If SUN is an early stage turn around, then its storage business is a later stage massive pruning project (and turn around). Yen probably doesn't know that's the job and when he finds out in the coming months, is he going to embrace the challenge?
I see Schwartz, an insider, unable to do the radical things needed to remake SUN. I don't see him extending beyond his tech-guy comfort zone to reach into the icy blue cold of business logic to make his decisions. This layoff announcement didn't prove anything.
