Simon’s Blog

Tim Bray, of Sun Microsystems, has an interesting post on his blog, discussing in public his views on what he believes the future direction of his employer should  be.  While I think some parts of what Tim suggests in his post have merit, overall, my opinion is his analysis and conclusions are totally wide of the mark. Tim is Director of Web Technologies at Sun.  Given the old adage – when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail -  Tim’s conclusions are, perhaps, not too surprising.   That is, as might be predicted, Tim wants Sun to focus exclusively on server-side web technologies, and drop everything to do with the client (desktop and mobile), and everything that isn’t directly about the web.   This, then, is my response to Tim’s post…

Tim’s analysis starts to go wrong near the beginning, when he lists the Sun assets that he thinks are excellent relative to the competition.   This list forms the basis for his entire argument about Sun’s future strategy.  So, if he gets that wrong, the whole strategy is likely to be wrong.  Thus, it’s worth looking at this list in some detail. Let’s take one key item:

“The storage-products portfolio, particularly as demonstrated in the recently-announced Unified Storage product line.”

To be clear, Tim’s assertion is that Sun’s storage offering is excellent compared to the competition.  That struck me as rather odd when I read it.  Why? Not because Sun’s new storage offering isn’t interesting (it is!); but because just two days ago, Tim wrote a piece about Sun’s Unified Storage offering. In that piece he stated in his conclusion that:

“I don’t know what the competition has on offer.”

Eh? What changed in the last two days?   Has Tim suddenly become an expert on the storage market?   I doubt it.  The most likely explanation, I suspect, is that Tim chose to put assets in his “better than the competition” list that happen to fit with his preconceived belief about the direction he wants Sun to take.   As evidence for this, I’ll point out a few excellent Sun assets that Tim rather conveniently “forgot” to put on his list:

• Java Swing – the world’s most powerful, and most popular GUI toolkit
• OpenOffice – the world’s most popular free office suite with over one hundred million users
• Java JRE – one of the world’s most widely distributed desktop run-times, on around eight hundred million desktops
• Java ME, the world’s most widely deployed mobile run-time on over two billion mobile phones.

In his post, Tim dismisses the desktop/rich client with three flawed assertions. Firstly, he wrongly asserts that Sun knows nothing about this area, aside from IDE development.   That, of course, is rather obviously not true (see the list of Sun assets above that Tim apparently forgot about).    Secondly, he wrongly asserts that, in any case, aside from a handful of “editor” applications, there’s no value in any of this desktop stuff.    Thirdly, Tim wrongly, and rather mysteriously, asserts that, because the browser has become a super-important platform for application deployment, that means that Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX are all doomed.  Eh?!  That last one is really odd, given these technologies are browser technologies. What’s reason does Tim give for this?  Simple! He “just totally doesn’t believe” that they’re important.

Now, having said all this, I should say that I like Tim’s writing a lot in general; but his post about “What Sun Should Do?” doesn’t make much sense to me at all.  Aside from disagreeing with his technical assessment, though, there’s a bigger problem.  His post is all about defining a vision of a future Sun that looks totally different to the current company.  Never mind that Tim’s future vision for Sun is a simply a reflection of his own personal interests – web technologies.   Never mind that his future vision doesn’t credibly explain how the new Sun would make any money.  The problem is – vision isn’t Sun’s problem.  IMHO, the number one priority for Sun, right now, is simply to survive.

This isn’t rocket science. The company needs to buy itself more time. This is no time for a weak company to be selling assets that provide profitable revenues streams, by the way. If anything, this is the time to be acquiring them. So, why Tim wants to significantly reduce Sun’s investment in Java when it’s profitable, and growing revenues at a decent rate, I don’t understand.   The places to make cuts are in those areas which are currently losing money; and the cuts must be deep enough to return those areas to profitability in the short term.  So, to answer Tim’s question “What Should Sun Do?” – the problem that needs to be solved is achieving short-term profitability.   It has to do that by making deep cuts, while growing revenues as best it can. The company can rebuild once (if) it can achieve that…