At Oracle OpenWorld Scott McNealy likened himself to Steve Jobs and Sun to Apple at the launch of the iPod when mentioning several new server products that Sun is releasing.
Besides the obvious fact that there is no correlation between a mass-market consumer product and enterprise servers, McNealy's reliance on Sun's "iPod moments" proves that the company's strategy is still completely unclear.
The iPod defined Apple's big foray into making computers digital entertainment centers. It redefined the company. The new Sun hardware like the SunFire X4100,is, dare I say, just a server and is not something that redefines Sun. If anything it just reinforces existing impressions. The new servers are merely piecemeal components to a variety of other quasi-related parts. I'm trying to get the SeeBeyond, open source ESB, StorageTek, and new servers to make sense, but it just doesn't.
Sun has been on a five-year stock slide, having lost about 90 percent of its share price since January 2000. It has not had a year of positive net income since its fiscal year 2001. Apple is at $52/share, has a market cap 3x Sun and $7.5b of cash on it's balance sheet. It's a great target for Sun to aspire to, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on September 21, 2005 07:39 PM
