On Sun Microsystems Inc.
Sun Microsystems Inc. long term advantage.
(10-10-2006) For a company to perpetuate in time it needs more than great products and services. Here is why Sun Microsystems Inc. has what is needed to be relevant for years to come.
Although products and services excellence is key to a company success, it is not by itself a powerful enough reason to assure its survival, since any advantage can be lost to new and disruptive competitors.
The real competitive advantage must be inside the company's DNA. Fortunately, nowadays, almost every major company has a website with corporate info. I will walk through three different companies websites's company info part to elaborate on this idea.
As a happy employee, I will first talk about Sun company's site. What is important to notice about this page is that Sun company has a Vision (how Sun company sees the future of the world) a Mission (in that future of the world what will be Sun company's role) and a Strategy (how Sun company will achieve its mission).
As a further explanation of Sun company's vision, particularly the “We see everyone and everything participating on the network.” part, I recall a talk by Scott McNealy in the year 2000 were he said that in the future, even light bulbs will be connected to the Internet, generating traffic about its expected duration and location. So, whenever the light bulbs approach their deadline, they will fire a request to build a new one to the light bulb maker company, and that new light bulb would be shipped to the exact building, floor and office that the soon to die light bulb resides. When the maintenance guy go to the room and check for the light bulb, he will see it die in exactly that moment, he will replace the failed light bulb and place the new one (and the company will receive the corresponding invoice automatically). Today we see more and more independent devices generating its own data on Internet, so the “everything participating on the network” is becoming a reality as we speak.
Sun company's Mission is all about its “Share” motto. Communities are the way of the future, and Sun company is investing to help them get there sooner and easier.
The “We share our solutions” part of Sun company's Strategy is another big competitive advantage. Again, it is all about creating communities. Communities are the way of the future.
IBM company's site is really interesting. They only have a two paragraph Mission statement. The first paragraph simply states that they will produce “information technologies”, and the second paragraph simply states that they will throw Global Services on it as needed to make it run... the site doesn't talk about Vision (they don't have any expressed idea where they think the world is going) nor Strategy (perhaps the part were they states that they will throw Global Services to their technologies can be view as a Strategy, but it is not a valuable Strategy from a customer point of view).
Once of the worst corporate pages I ever read is from Microsoft. They want to “help people reach their potential”... actually they do. Nowadays thanks to people that is tired of Windows problems, they have fueled angry army of programmers to create Windows alternatives like Solaris Operating System and Linux, so they are actually delivering on their Mission (helping people reach their potential by running Solaris Operating System and Linux). Well, actually, to be fair, they had a Vision... not a bright one, but at least it was something.
Even worst is their “values” part. The first two values are “integrity, honesty,” which are hard to swallow from a convicted monopoly... I really hope that if a customer is still buying from them, it must be because of high exit barriers, because if they ever choose by free will to buy from Microsoft, they will be locking themselves for long and hard times.
The fact that Sun company is the only major IT company with a Vision (and a good Vision I might add) is the biggest reason why I choose Sun as the company to work for. No other company have a more compelling long term view, nor they execute as good.
As I see it, the OpenSolaris and OpenSparc communities are here to stay, and will be fundamental to Sun company's future.
Only time will tell...
See you next blog.
Posted at 07:14PM Oct 10, 2006 by maitas in Sun | Comments[0]