Duane Percox wrote:


"If you track Sun you know that they have a new-ish president who comes
from the software side of the equation.

And that McNealy has been fervent in his unwillingness to make major
changes that industry analysts/pundits/major stockholders have been
suggesting. A $4 stock price is not gonna cut it much longer :-)

If Sun doesn't get some traction in their current efforts I would bet
that the board will exhaust it's patience with Scott and then it
really won't matter what he thinks anymore...

The only way to get shareholder value returned is to sell Sun off either
in whole or in part(s).

I am predicting some very interesting developments in this arena
before June 2007 (Sun Fiscal year is july-june)."

I have been struggling to understand Sun's relevance today.  It is clear to
a lot of us that production quality Linux has arrived along with widespread
availablity of commodity servers.  So, even if Solaris were somehow better
than Linux, a lot of users today feel that Linux is good enough to get the
job done.  There are manys situation where in the past one would have
purchased a proprietary OS and the hardware that goes with it today,
increasingly they are using Linux and Intel servers.

True, they have some very reliable software, particularly for high end
users.  However, I understand that they are porting their high end
filesystem to Linux.  So they could have some value by creating a more
robust (reliable) Linux for high end users.

Next, JAVA is big.  However, I'm not sure how much of that world Sun really
controls. IBM seems to have a lot to say about what users get in the JAVA
world.  It seems to me that IBM has more influence than SUN does in the JAVA
mindset to the extent that any one vendor has a lot of control there.

Storage is yet another issue. EMC seems to dominate and others follow.
Moreover, the low cost stuff has made big time inroads.  You can get a
terabyte raid 5 storage system from Frys for less than $1,000 today.

The question is, if SUN were to go away today, who would miss them?  You may
be right, they could still have some value to someone else who is still in
business.  That is, they could be worth more dead than alive.  However, if
they wait too long to sell ....


Charles Finley
619-795-0720

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