WILL THE SUN CONTINUE TO
SHINE?
V.Nagaradjane, Email: nagaradjanev@rediffmail.com
Sun Microsystems is set to go under the control
of Oracle. This is going to make a great impact on the software industry as well
as the lives of ordinary computer users. Although many common people may not
know Sun Microsystems, Java is all-pervasive. When the leader of software
innovation goes under a different management, what could be the impact on
ordinary programmers?
THE ORIGINS OF
SUN
Sun Microsystems was founded by Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim and Scott McNealy (the current President of SUN) on February 12, 1982[1] along with Bill Joy, who joined a bit later. All the four persons were strong in the design and implementation of Unix operating system. Bill Joy was a seasoned developer who wrote the famous vi editor. The technical superiority of the company originates from the strength of its founders.
The name SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network, which is a tribute to the place of graduation of the three founder members of SUN. The commercial success of Sun Microsystems was strongest around the late nineties, triggered by the dot-com boom. After the year 2000, Sun was facing a consistently downward trend. The stock prices, the revenues and all other economic indicators turned against Sun Microsystems. The latest takeover by Oracle is the culmination of those monetary losses.
Sun is the most advanced computer company on earth, due to its strong presence on both hardware and software sides. The impact of Java language on the programming community is well known. Java has become universally available on all electronic goods, whether it is mobile phone, digital camera, washing machine or a full fledged computer.
Sun Microsystems acquired around 50 software companies to date. It acquired the technology available from those companies and improved on them. Sun provided continuous enhancements to its hardware and software products. Inspite of the success on the hardware and the software sectors, Sun has met with the financial difficulties of immense proportions.
PRODUCTS OF
SUN
Sun maintains a strong presence in the enterprise hardware market, with enterprise server machines and highly scalable blade servers. The enterprise server machine runs on Sun's SPARC processor with speeds reaching 1000GFlops. Sun also offers storage solutions which can maintain data backup for critical enterprises.
On the software segment, Sun provides the high quality Solaris operating system, server software and productivity tools. Solaris accounts for major portion of Sun's software revenue[2]. Sun moved from closed source software model to open source software model. This resulted in the creation of OpenSolaris operating system as a freely available open source edition, similar to Linux operating system. Sun wanted to leverage the thriving Linux community in creating innovations at the Solaris kernel.
The two office suites StarOffice and OpenOffice became the mainstay of Sun for providing productivity. While StarOffice was commercially distributed, OpenOffice was distributed as free open source software. This positioned OpenOffice as the major rival for the Microsoft office package. Both StarOffice and OpenOffice support MS Office formats, making it simple to migrate.
The MySQL database management software (acquired by Sun in 2008) provided great business opportunities for Sun. MySQL has a strong presence in the enterprise data segment, running mainly on Windows and Linux. Before the acquisition of MySQL, Sun was involved in the development of PostgreSQL server for quiet long time. With the acquisition of MySQL, it had the ability to leverage the entire open source enterprise market. For a long time, MySQL remained a free software, but customer support for MySQL had to be obtained on payment.
Sun Microsystems was providing data storage and management products of high quality. The innovative ZFS file storage system was a highly scalable alternative to the traditional file systems. Data storage systems marketed by Sun were optimized for performance and maximum data integrity.
Apart from these, Sun Microsystems was marketing identity management systems for authentication of users. Many corporates, banks and telecommunication companies adopted Sun's ID management system due to its simplicity and reliability.
Java was one of the most revolutionary language ever invented. After C language, Java was the only language which made revolutionary changes to the life of programmers. The portability of the compiled Java byte code was the key to its success. Programs developed on any system might reasonably run on other systems without recompilation. Java language is present on all platforms, from computers to mobile phones.
Java from Sun Microsystems is distributed in three different flavours. The Java Standard Development Kit (J2SDK) is the basic tool for developing Java programs targeted on computers. The Java 2 Mobile Edition (J2ME) is meant for developing software that runs on mobile devices. Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE) was available for providing enterprise web solutions. The Enterprise Edition of Java was not as successful as the J2SDK or J2ME. Recently, Sun Microsystems released GlashFish as its Java Enterprise Edition. JavaFX is a web based technology for the display of rich audio, video and animation over the internet. It is meant to compete with Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash.
There is the NetBeans IDE, which incorporates all of the classical features required for visual programming. I remember the early days of Java when Borland JBuilder (a commercial IDE) provided VB like user interface for Java. It was thrilling to see that software at work. Now, all those and more enterprise class features are available free of cost in the NetBeans IDE.
The xVM from Sun is a good quality virtualization engine, which could run multiple guest operating systems like Windows, Linux and Unix on top of a host operating system. This xVM is also released under both free software and enterprise licenses. The virtualization market is still nascent and has potential for growth.
INNOVATIONS FROM
SUN
Technological innovations from Sun Microsystems includes the development of cool SPARC processor which runs on multiple cores at slower clock speeds to deliver better performance. This was a contrast to other companies which were running after clock speed, more heat, more power consumption and eventually, less efficient computing. Cooler processors from Sun demanded less power and emanated less heat – resulting in savings for the enterprise.
Development of Java language was the single most important innovation of Sun Microsystems on software side. The quality of visual interface components provided by the swing library, easy API for network programming using sockets, Remote Method Invocation, seamless input/output API that worked with files and sockets without any difference, native support for zip and gzip formats, JDBC API to connect with any database server - the features of Java language are really good. The consistency of its visual programming API marked it a class apart from the half baked form design software that existed before its arrival.
Although Unix was not an innovation of Sun, the finely optimized Solaris operating system was technically superior to other products available in the enterprise market. The AT&T Unix was the first created Unix system and it contained many advanced features required for networking. Since Solaris derived many features from AT&T Unix and improved upon those features, Solaris is one of the finest products available for enterprise computing.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OTHER
SOFTWARE COMPANIES AND SUN
I remember the first important defence I used for adopting Java language when Visual Basic was ready to provide a faster design environment. I designed a form using VB and similar Frame using Java. I ran both the applications and after resizing the monitor resolution. While the Java Frame showed all the components neatly arranged, the VB form showed up a shabby looking interface.
I told my friends that Java had layout managers for maintaining visual components in appropriate positions. While products developed using VB did not know anything about layout management, I showed them how some of the software from the same company could resize themselves to suite any screen resolution. I told my friends that we were offered an API which was inferior even from the standards of the company which marketed it. This argument took place about than 10 years back.
Before the arrival of Java, one had to purchase visual interface libraries for C or C++ languages separately from vendors or use Visual Studio, Borland C++ etc. This made the visual programs non-portable, since the libraries themselves were meant for a specific platform like Windows or Unix. Sun brought in the era of technical superiority through Java, which permitted visual interface programs to run seamlessly across all operating systems and made the programmers life easier.
While other companies were increasingly closing the source code of their software, Sun became increasingly open source. The open source model of sun penetrated so deep that the Solaris operating system was released as OpenSolaris.
All this is good. What about the fiscal status of Sun? Why the company went so deep into financial misfortunes? Why the stock value became one twentieth of the original value over the last ten years?
PROBABLE REASONS FOR THE
FINANCIAL TROUBLES
Sun was adopting increasingly open source model. While the competitors made their clients to pay in cents and dollars for each bit of software delivered by them, Sun was sitting like a Software Sanyasi (pontiff) whose main aim was not money alone. The failure of Sun to extract money from each and every bit of software (like its competitors do) was good for common people but bad for the finance of Sun.
Although Sun adopted open source principles, it was not a fitting model of business for its software. While free software foundation received monetary help from major companies – Sun maintained itself with low levels of income obtained from large corporates by offering support for its products. Sun was different from Free Software Foundation – it had to take care of the well being of its employees.
With more than 30,000[5] employees around the world, research and development facilities of unparalleled strength, Sun deserved (perhaps needed) to earn more than it did. Imagine such high class tools being handed over to one of its competitors – they would happily make money – not necessarily by developing more innovations – but by marketing the existing products with aggressive strategies.
Compare Oracle, Microsoft, DELL or HP with Sun. Sun is clearly superior by the strength of its R&D, hardware and software products. While other companies take their hardware and software products with vigour to the customers and earn what little each customer can pay, Sun's products remained a class apart – out of the reach of ordinary low level customers. Rather, the non-enterprise customers were permitted take every piece of software for free.
The only notable parallel for Sun could be Apple Comptuers, because both of them make hardware and software products of the highest quality. But, Apple markets its products with much vigour across the world. Apple is not shy about earning small money like 100 or 200 dollars from its costumers by selling the iPODs and iPHONEs. Apple maintains its survival not just by the strength of its innovations, but by the strength of its marketing strategies. Sun does not have such aggressive marketing strategies, nor does it aim to sell more number of products at lower prices. This might be one of the reasons why Sun had to suffer hard when large corporates across the world faced recession.
WHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM
SUN IN THE FUTURE?
The answer would be greatly influenced by what Oracle plans to do with Sun's hardware and software platforms. I would simply assume that Oracle is hell bent on making Sun's software products as closed source as possible. Whether Oracle would be willing to keep the large research and development facilities created by Sun remains to be seen in the future.
The continuation of MySQL would be a great question mark. Availability of open source database server to compete against Oracle in the enterprise segment is unpleasant for Oracle. It might plan the death of MySQL in two ways: i) kill it right now. No mercy, ii) stop further development and make the MySQL server increasingly outdated. Please note - it is only a guess through a pessimistic eye.
If MySQL has got any luck, there is a third possibility. MySQL might be handed over to an organization like Apache Software Foundation. This might be the most generous move for saving the future of MySQL and helping the survival of many low end enterprises.
It could have been better for both Sun and
The future of PostgreSQL server will also be affected, since Sun was a major contributor to the development of PostgreSQL. Continued support from Sun for PostgreSQL is not guaranteed. This would slow down the development of PostgreSQL.
JavaDB is another low end database server from Sun Microsystems written entirely in Java. The immediate future of JavaDB is not so bleak, because it is so tender a child compared to the strength of Oracle. Whereas, the long term prospects may not be good for JavaDB, especially if it gains any limelight due to its association with Java.
Future of Java technology products like J2SDK, J2ME, GlassFish, JavaFX and NetBeans might be safe. But, the continuation of new innovations would be a question mark if Oracle reduces the research and development on these technologies as a cost cutting measure.
On the positive side, the virtualization product xVM would be better tuned to support Oracle DBMS. Moreover, Oracle might plan to bundle its DBMS with Solaris operating system and leverage the combined strength of the most mature operating system supporting the most powerful database server. Already, Oracle is marketing a flavour of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to support its DBMS. Solaris would be another powerful shot in its arm.
With regard to the 47,000[5] enterprise customers of Sun, there would be no changes in the quality of support for the existing products and the availability of new products. Oracle will try expand the Sun enterprise customer base at the fastest rates possible, because there is much room for expansion across the world, especially when combined with Oracle enterprise products.
WISH FOR GOOD
TIMES
As things stand now, it becomes clear that corporate companies should never have a charitable view towards their customers. Sun Microsystems is the largest contributor to the free software movement. The release of OpenOffice and OpenSolaris has given the free software community the strength to stand proud against proprietary products. Java has been the most wonderful language ever created in the history of computing. There is no room for the gentle ones in the corporate world. As a long standing beneficiary of the Java SDK freely released by Sun (my login ID itself is java in my machine) – my mind is aggrieved. We could only wish that the Sun continues to shine forever.
REFERENCES
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1. |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems.htm |
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2. |
Feinberg, D. et al., Vendor Focus for Sun Microsystems' Software, Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00158137, 11 July 2008. |
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4. |
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5. |
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/2009-0420/sun_oracle_presentation.pdf |
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V.Nagaradjane is an ardent Java programmer and a free-lance developer. He can be contacted at nagaradjanev@rediffmail.com |
