They aren’t really a services company in the way IBM are - they should be the world’s biggest Java consultancy, for instance, but aren’t.

They aren’t a box company, either. Do the advantages of Sun’s x86 servers really outweigh a commodity box from Dell??

Directions : Move from hardware VAR towards the appliance computing market. At least two of our customers use appliances (servers running a single app) that are basically Dell servers running Linux rebadged by the reseller.

It’s difficult to convince an end company to pay more for a Solaris system, particularly if they lack expertise to manage it, but an appliance you just drop into the network is easy to understand. Think Cisco, think ‘hardware’ firewalls.

They should be making it easy to assemble an enterprise architecture out of a few purchased bits of kit.

With auto-discovery technology like Bonjour why can I not simply assemble my architecture by using a GUI to link a Tomcat based Java app with the database server at one end and load-balancers at the other?

But that, I think, has long been there problem - fantastic engineering, appreciated by a technical audience.

Next week is going to be interesting from the Java perspective. JavaOne starts on Tuesday. There’ll be a number of updates on “consumer Java”, including on JavaFX Mobile.

@Mr Y. Sun’s Open Source strategy is a good one. From where they are now, they can add a massive amount to their market cap by delivering on this. MySQL was a great buy for Sun. I know a lot of people find the Open Source stuff hard to understand, but that doesn’t make it the wrong way to go.

@Asam. I’m not quite sure what the purpose would be of buying Sun, and then throwing aways its most valuable assets such as Solaris and Java

Now that Yahoo is free, how about a Yahoo and Sun merger? Two companies, badly managed with confused strategies, but together, might just be enough to take on Google. JavaFX could be Yahoo’s answer to Android, Yahoo servers and possible future cloud applications hosted on Sun hardware and software. A CEO with enough vision could make it happen, and a serious threat to Google is a good thing for the market in the long-term. No conflicts here with Apple, obviously Microsoft comes out worse…

Sun traditionally did everything through VAR’s and them seem to be unwilling to undermine them and do much direct. For example we have support on Sun, from Sun, but we have some valued added reseller holding for us - causes no end of problems and adds no value . That’s not to say VAR’s don’t ever add value, but sometimes you know exactly what you want.

Then need to make a decision on this - it is too hard to buy Sun kit. Either provide software that the VAR’s can use/skin or put up a proper direct channel. Apple had a similar dilemma a few years ago, and while their offerings are different, they took the right decision in massively upping their direct presence - not only can they then control the quality of the buying experience, in Apples case, the presence on the high street massively improves brand awareness.

Another weakness in their X86 range is they don’t have all the nice features yet for lights out etc that SPARC do, and more importantly key applications - for example Oracle really lag on them ( if you choose solaris ). ie Oracle 11g is nowhere in sight for Solaris X64

Also in the lower end space people are looking not just for systems, they are looking for solutions - again that’s not really Sun - they expect the customer to be technically saavy - quite frankly a lot of IT departments aren’t, never mind companies too small to have IT people.