Q1, and Do Operating Systems Matter?
We just reported our earnings for Q1. The way this works (for those that don't already know), we issue a press release to the news agencies after the markets close, then Mike Lehman (our Chief Financial Officer) and I host a conference call to provide color and context. Financial and other analysts from around the marketplace dial in, our VP of Investor Relations walks through the financials, then Mike I provide some overall context before opening up the line for questions.
Here's a page with links to the presentation materials, and the audio transcript. The whole process is a tad anachronistic.
It was a busy week overall - in addition to presenting our financial report card for Q1, I was the keynote just prior to Larry Ellison at Oracle Open World. You can see (and watch) that presentation, here. (You might need to scroll down to the middle of the page... and if I look particularly pale, I wasn't feeling great - to any other parents of small children, you'll understand the source of my malaise in three simple words, "Back to School.")
On another topic, if you're looking for Sun's opinion on Oracle's decision to fork Red Hat, here are some comments Greg Papadopoulos (Sun's Chief Technologist, you can tell by the way his hair behaves) and I made during a regularly scheduled interview with Hal Stern. Hal, an inveterate bloggeur himself, leads Sun's field Systems Engineering community (the technical folks closest to our customers, otherwise known as "the system in Sun Microsystems.").
(Update: For those whose news readers don't show the video images in-line, see Video 1 and Video 2 directly at YouTube.)
,
If you want the quick summary of the videos, not that it'll surprise anyone, it comes down to this: I'm really glad we invested so heavily in Solaris over the past five years, making it freely available, making it open source, and making it available on HP, Dell and IBM, not simply Sun.
Adoption matters.
Posted on 08:44AM Oct 31, 2006 | Comments[20]
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Posted by Andres on October 31, 2006 at 09:20 AM PST #
Posted by Mike on October 31, 2006 at 11:03 AM PST #
Posted by Larry Chen on October 31, 2006 at 11:17 AM PST #
I'm relieved.
I saw you at the Oracle Openworld conference. I'd seen you do keynotes/speaches before at Java One. I told the folks I was with that you're very good in person - especially compared to Micheal Dell (that was a horrible keynote. Am I allowed to bash Dell here? By name?).
I was surprised at how un-energetic you sounded. Your content was good. You had several humorous jabs at other companies. You just didn't seem to be there. I'm glad there was a good reason for that. From all the good news coming from Sun I figured you'd be as happy as ever.
I'm looking forward to the next time I get to see you in person. Perhaps I'll avoid any speach you give in the fall.
I do have one question. What is to stop any company (Microsoft, perhaps?) from doing to any open source company what Oracle did to Dell? Can that be a great way to kill off competition? Can someone do it to Solaris?
Posted by Mike Kingzett on October 31, 2006 at 01:25 PM PST #
Posted by Bharath Ravi Kumar on October 31, 2006 at 08:15 PM PST #
Posted by Bharath Ravi Kumar on October 31, 2006 at 08:51 PM PST #
Posted by Sam Tingleff on October 31, 2006 at 10:09 PM PST #
Posted by David on October 31, 2006 at 11:26 PM PST #
"Can that be a great way to kill off competition? Can someone do it to Solaris?"
If Sun had open sourced Solaris in 2002 (as opposed to 2005), we would have seen a lot more adoption of Solari/OpenSolaris than it is today.
As more companies become familiar with Solaris/OpenSolaris, they can offer various levels of support for Solaris. To give the same level of support for Solaris as SUN does, they need to be very well versed on Solaris and its applications. Sun knows Solaris best. Who is second best ? Oracle, of course. It ever OpenSolaris/Solaris gets anywhere near as popular as Redhat, Oracle will consider offering enterprise support.
For OpenSolaris to become anywhere near as popular as Redhat/Fedora, there needs to be a good version of Opensolaris for laptops/notebooks and desktops. Only after people use it for personal use, will they consider using it on servers. We saw this on Linux and Windows. Once people were comfortable using Windows Professional, Windows Server applications grew popular. So, Sun should consider making a desktop/notebook version of Solaris a TOP PRIORITY.
BR,
~A
Posted by anjan bacchu on October 31, 2006 at 11:31 PM PST #
Posted by Jas on November 01, 2006 at 02:50 AM PST #
Posted by Daniel Ichbiah on November 01, 2006 at 05:37 AM PST #
Posted by Kevin Hutchinson on November 01, 2006 at 05:59 AM PST #
Posted by Ex Sun employee and shareholder on November 01, 2006 at 06:02 AM PST #
Posted by Herm on November 01, 2006 at 02:25 PM PST #
Posted by Oliver Widder on November 01, 2006 at 03:54 PM PST #
Posted by 201.43.133.220 on November 01, 2006 at 07:39 PM PST #
Posted by Philippe CLEMENT on November 02, 2006 at 04:30 AM PST #
Posted by Gary on November 02, 2006 at 05:32 AM PST #
Posted by David on November 02, 2006 at 07:37 AM PST #
Jonathan, thanks for taking time to write such interesting blogs...
I guess you know that the excellent Sun Solaris Support (including hardware support) is by far the cheapest, compared to RedHat and Oracle's Unbrakeable Linux?
There is an interesting comparison I found in a blog (quoting):
"Take an Sun Fire X2200 M2 with 2 processors. This is a system, Oracles marketing touts for it´s RAC deployments.Support 24x7 (Premium Support) for Redhat AS: 2499$ (Source: Redhat.com Store)
Support 24x7 (Premier Support) for Linux at Oracle : 1199$ (Source: Oracle UBL FAQ)
Support 24x7 (Gold) for Solaris X86 at Sun: 420$ (Source: sun.com-Store)
The price for Solaris contains hardware maintance Monday to Friday from 8-8 with onsite technican in 4 hours."
Now, the problem is, nobody who buys Linux support seems to know this...Posted by Mika on November 03, 2006 at 02:00 PM PST #