MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-09-19 |
| FROM | From: "Steve Milo"
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] Sun reports Wall Street sick of Free Software :(
|
>PROPOGANDA
The proper word in marketing talk is public relations.
Sun is doing what it has to do to keep its customers, this is a fact of life
no matter where you go. Whatever word or phrase you use the bottom line is
Sun is not going to be edged out by anyone.
Furthermore, Wall Street is not known to use cutting edge high quality
technology. Despite the myth that is perpetuated.
The only reason Wall Street likes a dual Opteron AMD machine is because now
all the trades can be made down in the fractional cents. 64 bits will permit
that and at a faster rate (for less than a 64bit Sun machine). Not that that
faster rate is really necessary, because despite all the hoopla the
chokepoint is the pipe not the machine.
The AMD is also a favorable choice because of its x86 compatibility. Whereas
GNU/Linux could (have?) really do some damage if they lit a fire
under their engineers rear ends.
Sun has the internal corporate fortitude to do it, even though from a
technological standpoint GNU/Linux is superior than Solaris. I had read that
the system calls in GNU/Linux are far more advanced than Solaris (do a google
search for GNU/Linux on Sun the website I think is www.ultralinux.com).
One reason for this advantage is that Sun uses proprietary Unix code. Which
cannot be easily modified or improved upon without opening up a can of legal
worms.
GNU/Linux does not suffer from any such problem and affords the opportunity
to implement dramatic stable improvements in its source code.
Whereas proprietary software companies have to jump through hoops for
incremental changes. Or create workarounds that bog the system down or make
it insecure for anything more than personal home use.
This is what I mean when I talk about how Free Software/GNU is a far more
powerful business model than proprietary software. Which brings me to what I
mean when I say GNU/Linux has been riding on the coattails of popularity long
enough. The GNU/Linux community is too busy playing Sun's, MS' and sadly
sometimes OSX's game. The problem is not in the software, the problem is in
the packaging. Trailblazing, There has to be one go to place that is
knowledgable. One of those places is Sun, GNU/Linux is a vast community
which works for software development collaboration. Implementation in the
real world is different, Wall Street wants to have a relationship with one
company. Not multiple consultants. Which is actually how MS is trying to
weasel its way into Wall Street. Their products are crappy and Wall Street
knows it, ms in general is a corrupt company and Wall Street knows it. But
for the desktop they are perceived to be the only game in town.
RedHat has (or had depending on the initiative they will take on this
matter) to understand that ego plays a role on Wall Street and an effective
one at that, despite what the article says.
Wall Street is indeed tightly knit community. A company no matter
how great its product may be, can be gone and forgotten at the end of the
trading day.
If customer service is crap that company's *minutes* are numbered. I kid you
not when I say *minutes*.
One of ILX's competitors in early 90's (before I worked for ILX) had an
outstanding stock market data product. But there was *one* time where their
customer service response time was poor. By the end of the day that stock
market data company was gone. It was called sharksomething or something, I
dont recall the name. But that story as told to me by one of the senior
people on staff stuck with me. My days at customer service reflected the
demands clients put on their service provider.
Wall Street is not just *some* customer that looks for ISP's. If you do
business with a Wall Street firm you are effectively getting in bed with
them. The largest reason GNU/Linux is on Wall Street is because of the
effective schmoozing the RedHat marketing people had done. Kudos to them on
that, but that wont keep them in the door.
The honeymoon may in fact be over but the marriage, if it is going to
last, is only beginning. RedHat and Suse better learn fast. They have
to implement a corporate structure that responds instantiously to questions
from Wall Street firms. Without using some public forum (if that is in fact
true). That is how Sun does it and that is how MS wants to
do it. Thankfully some sensibilities still prevail and MS is being edged out
of Wall Street.
One last note, if Sun does something outlandish that prevents any other OS
from running on their Dual Opteron offerings. This could also play into
GNU/Linux' favor, specifically Suse. Suse offers smp with the 2.6 kernel and
64 bits. They have had that offering for about a year before RedHat. Suse
has been at the Dual Opteron game longer. But the Opteron has this remote
sensing thing right in the CPU, so Sun may use that in some capacity.
Welcome to the world of corporate politicing, consider this the big time and
its time to get to work.
One little macha,
Steve M
On Sat, 18 Sep 2004 15:57:38 -0400, Ruben Safir wrote
> Sun's Schwartz: Linux honeymoon is over on Wall Street
>
> Jonathan Schwartz looks to Wall Street as one of the few industries with
> the means—money and will—to regularly redefine the computer
> industry. So Sun's president and chief operating officer is making
> it a goal to get to know Wall Street a lot better, including a visit
> to New York next week trying to drum up some attention to this
> effort. Wall Street & Technology did a quick E-mail question-and-
> answer with Schwartz in which he, among other things, predicts a
> growing disillusionment with Linux. Sun has had to battle a cost-
> cutting mentality that prompted many financial companies in recent
> years to migrate off Solaris to Linux running on cheaper boxes. "I
> would say about one customer a month is telling me that the
> honeymoon is over because for all practical purposes, the Linux
> market has tipped to a single vendor—Red Hat," says Schwartz. Here's
> the full exchange:
>
> Wall Street & Technology: What does Sun have to do differently than
> it has been to win more business on Wall Street?
>
> Schwartz: If you had asked that question two years, or even a year
> ago, I would have been able to tell you what we should be doing
differently.
> But right now Sun is doing all the right stuff. For one thing, Sun is
> listening closely to its customers. It sounds simple, but listening
> requires us to put our egos aside and find out what is really keeping
> developers, operators and the CXO up at night. It's about really
> understanding their needs and then creating the technology—and
> solutions—that matters to them. And it's not just me, Scott McNealy,
> my executive staff. The whole company is listening. If our employees
> aren't visiting our Executive Briefing Center, spending full days
> with customers, then that's a big concern of mine.
>
> Secondly, we're attacking two things head-on: cost and complexity. I
> haven't found a customer yet who has complained about that. Instead
> of selling just a piece of software, or just a storage device, we're
> selling the whole system. It's a smarter system than anybody else's
> on the planet because it runs on top of something we call Solaris,
> which is by far the best operating system on the planet. Why? It's
> got the rich features that Wall Street customers want at a price
> point that is below Red Hat's. And, it runs on both SPARC and x86
> processors, for whatever your purpose. Mind you, Sun didn't do
> Solaris on X86-based chips a few years ago, so this is a big change
> based on customer feedback. And today we also have an agreement now
> with Microsoft to develop products that work together, that
> interoperate. How's that for doing things differently?
>
> WS&T: Where is the adoption of Linux on Wall Street today—just getting
> started, or starting to peak? Which reality is better news for Sun's
> business?
>
> Schwartz: We want Linux to succeed because Linux is a version of
> Unix. And Sun is built on Unix. There will always be the need for
> Linux, but there will always be a market for Solaris—the number one
> Unix OS on earth. Honestly, I would say about one customer a month
> is telling me that the honeymoon is over because for all practical
> purposes, the Linux market has tipped to a single vendor—Red Hat.
> And things like professional services support, upgrade costs, ISV
> support and security are becoming an issue no one wants to depend on
> a single vendor for. Imagine having thousands and thousands of
> servers all over your data center with just-OK features to manage
> them to make sure they are fully utilized. That ends up being a lot
> of system administrators who don't work for free. So we've seen a
> lot of companies turning to Sun asking us what to do now.
>
> We know at least one instance when a financial services company had a
> problem with Red Hat's operating system and they asked Red Hat to
> fix it ASAP. Moments later it found its way onto a developer forum,
> posted by a Red Hat engineer. How's that for one throat to choke?
> Suffice it to say, this customer came to us for a better way. One by
> one, our customers are beginning to see that Solaris on AMD Opteron
> is the fastest and most reliable answer to leveraging commodity
> hardware while managing your compute network with ease. And now with
> Solaris 10, Sun has the types of features that Red Hat does not have,
> like logical partitioning and dynamic tracing. That's because there
> are billions of dollars of R&D in Solaris 10, and this is the
> payback to our customers.
>
> WS&T: Sun hardware is seen as expensive, often too expensive. Do you
> agree it's thought of that way today? What's your answer?
>
> Schwartz: Someone must have started a rumor that Sun equals
> expensive, but if you look at the number of "success stories" my
> team shows me where customers are saving millions of dollars a year
> running Sun, then you'll realize it's just a question of showing
> everyone, one by one, the facts. Our biggest challenge was
> perception, not price or performance. We needed to prove that we've
> made a big change. In the last year we've been delivering on that.
> As I was saying, it's not that we don't have the industry-standard
> hardware, or that we don't have an extremely simple and predictable
> pricing model for our middleware and desktop stack, which we call
> Java Enterprise system and Java Desktop System respectively. We
> support GNU/Linux and have millions of Java developers as part of
> our ecosystem.
>
> The challenge was to get our products into our target market—those that
> don't want vendor lock-in and are looking for the best price/performance
> on the market. That becomes a perception challenge. So what we've
> done is begin proving ourselves to Wall Street. We're currently
> conducting a sizable handful of very strategic pilots with the top
> firms on Wall Street, running whatever Sun systems they choose to
> run whatever applications they want. Give them choice and let them
> decide. People like what they see.
>
> WS&T: In a year-or better, what measurement should we look at to see
> if you've succeeded in this market segment?
>
> Schwartz: You probably know this better than I do, but Wall Street
> is a tightly knit community, a community I am getting to know better
> every day. I'm not permitted to give forward-looking statements,
particularly
> about our financial results, but once our pilot customers start
> being as vocal about Solaris running on AMD Opteron as they were
> about Linux two years ago, I can assure you other industries will be
> following close behind. And we're seeing incredible momentum already,
> literally triple-digit growth in AMD Opteron server units shipped
> quarter over quarter coupled with huge Solaris download numbers.
>
> ____________________________
> NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
> Fair Use -
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NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
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