Every report I get tells me I want an Intel Mac, but my advisors keep telling me "Yes! But not just yet." I am reminded of St. Augustine praying for chastity. But Intel's first 64-bit next-generation chip will be out Real Soon Now; and in any event the World Wide Developer Conference will be in the San Francisco area in August, and that's when we expect some important announcements, and it's well to wait. So wait I will, but it's hard to do. Everyone I know who has got an Intel Mac is happy with it.
Scott McNealy has stepped down as CEO of Sun. He's one of the last of the giants. Among the comments I got from insiders, was this one from an astute industry observer:
I wasn't going to say anything because it's really painful to watch another industry pioneer fall apart. It's like a repeat of the SGI story.
Sun is trying to hang on to a market it helped invent, but for too long it refused to accept that servers were being commoditized by Microsoft. Arguably, Sun still refuses to accept that fact even though it now sells commodity x86 servers.
I think McNealy is stepping down because Wall Street wanted the more pragmatic and fiscally prudent Schwartz managing daily operations. Schwartz needs to pare back Sun's spending fairly dramatically, or it can't survive.
For example, Sun has multiple CPU and system design teams for a market that really can't support even one. Sun makes CPUs and chipsets for three markets: high-performance compute and database servers, low-cost web servers, and workstations. Sun has to get out of the workstation business entirely. It ought to get out of the high-end server business too, since there doesn't seem to be any way for Sun to make money on it. That would be a shame, since Sun does such great work there, but it just isn't profitable.
Throughput Computing is probably the one area where Sun could gain and hold a competitive advantage, but they need to focus the whole company on it, and that would mean shutting down most of their traditional business units.
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BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2006
