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List:       opensolaris-discuss
Subject:    Re: [osol-discuss] OpenSolaris cancelled,
From:       Joerg.Schilling () fokus ! fraunhofer ! de (Joerg Schilling)
Date:       2010-09-08 11:37:48
Message-ID: 4c87758c.JOkdCJn2FtuVowYZ%Joerg.Schilling () fokus ! fraunhofer ! de
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Orvar Korvar <knatte_fnatte_tjatte@yahoo.com> wrote:

> It doesnt matter how much Unix has lost ground. I agree that Unix lost ground, \
> everyone knows that. The question is not about the past. Let us instead try to look \
> into the future instead. 
> Oracle has 370.000 customers and they pay big money. Sun had 35.000 customers. \
> Oracle will make sure that their database plays best together with Solaris 11. And \
> Exadata is switching to Solaris too. Larry will make sure there are not only \
> technological reasons to switch to Solaris, but also business reasons.

In Germany we call this a "Milchmädchenrechnung".

A big number of customers does not result in the ability to sell more.

Sun has been extremely successfull in the 1980s. In that time, the company I 
worked for (H. Berthold AG - a German typesetting company) did sell 25% of all
produced Sun machines. An even bigger Sun HW seller at that time was Kodak.

So the majority of all sold machines in that time have been sold by only two
companies. Any attempt to earn more money costs you a big effort....

The number of direct customers in irrelevant, what counts is how many end users 
you can reach by your marketing network and I doubt that Oracle is able to 
reach a significant additional number of end users.

Also important is a strategy to reach new customers in the time frame 5-10 years
from now. To bne successful here, you need to penetrate universities and 
research institutes.

Sun had a big change to really enhance the number of end users if they did 
succeed with buying Apple as Apple has a working marketing network for the high 
volume market.



Now let us look at what Sun did recently:

Sun did not really care about the universities but there have been a lot of 
students that started with OpenSolaris recently.

Sun had the chance to sell a big number machines to European Governmental sites.
Sun recently failed to sell 35000 SunRay based working places to the city of 
Berlin. This was interest from the governmental institutions in Berlin, but HP 
later made the trade. Given the fact that the example in Berlin has influence 
for at least whole Germany, this was a bad deal for Sun.

What did Oracle change on that situation:

Oracle stopped updating the OpenSolaris source and caused the interest in the 
universities to be significantly reduced.

Oracle raised the prices for SunRay based wroking places and caused even less 
interest in a Oracle based server infrastructure in big sites by this decision.

Let us see whether Oracle is able to learn from mistakes and let us see whether 
this happens in a time before previous decisions did already kill the market.
Just remember the effect of the Solaris x86 "delay" announcement from early 
2002.


Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js@cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
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