SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Schwartz at the end of the road
In turn, this could prompt senior management changes in Sun, with the investors and the board taking the view that current management has run Sun into a dead-end, a cul-de-sac, from which the only exit for them is a company sale. If the company sale strategy fails then, surely, the senior management team must walk the plank.
They have lost any and all credibility as a management team that could take Sun forward as an independent entity. By not denying that talks with potential acquirers have taken place, and by not countering Otellini's reported and unaltered views about Sun hawking itself around, they are implying that the reports are correct and that they have no strategy for Sun going forward but a sale.
How can they then create a go-forward strategy and energise the company, having demonstrated that they believe the best Sun future is in a sell-off?
A failed sale will be a tremendous indictment of their capabilities and beliefs and they must, surely, be toast in that case. They will have zero credibility, having failed to sell Sun. Off with their heads and, quite possibly, exit Scott McNealy as well.
The board has not issued any denials, and so it too is being complicit in the realisation by Sun's customers and investors that Schwartz and his team have been and are trying to sell Sun with board approval.
A possibility for Sun, if the putative IBM buy fails, is that it will split itself up and sell off parts of the company in an attempt to gain funds, increase shareholder value and finance restructuring efforts aimed at closing down loss-making parts of the company. This will surely be done by new management with a new board chairman and new board members.
If the buy fails and the existing senior management team and board try to carry on as before, with Sun an independent entity, then they run the risk of becoming a laughing stock with no credibility within or outside the company. All they will be able to do is hold a Sun yard sale as competitors plunder Sun's customer base and channels.
It will be an ignominious end for what has been a very, very fine company - one that deserves better. ®
COMMENTS
Here we go again...
Well, it looks like the commodity PC has run roughshod over another high-end competitor. Thanks to Windows (NT/2000/XP) on the client and Linux on the server, plus Intel/AMD on the hardware side, there is no room for Sun.
Another vendor selling proprietary Unix running on RISC sees no future for itself.
Should we blame Scott McNealy or Jonathan Schwartz? What was Sun’s response when Intel and AMD were revving up the x86 since the mid-1990s to match SPARC? What does Sun offer that we cannot get from Linux or Microsoft? What is Sun Microsystems about, as a company? Have they reduced themselves to a soulless, hollow shell seeking to be consumed in order to survive?
Hopeless
8 years since the dot-com crash, what has Jonathan/Scott done. They drank too much of their own cool-aid. While they just milk the company dry with all these gold-plated rewards for letting the company with their incompetence and inattentiveness. All those cronies such as John Fowler, Greg Papadopoulous, Anil Gadre, Mike Lehman, Crawford Beveridge. All of them are complicit in destroying shareholder value. Look at HP, Apple and IBM. They all changed strategy and thrived. While Jonathan and Scott trapped the company in the same direction. Their stubbornness, incompetence and stupidity can be compared to George W Bush. Scott came from a GM family. No surprise there. He inherited the gift of being a one-trick pony!
@David Halko, right on...
Nice to read a comment that makes sense...
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