Sun shines dimly in Big Blue's shadow

Does Sun Microsystems have what it takes to remake itself in IBM's image?

Sun Microsystems has been in the news again. Predictably, its most recent earnings report disappointed shareholders and left analysts and customers alike wondering, again, just how the company plans to reverse its flagging fortunes. Given the current economic downturn, the prognosis seems plenty gloomy.

Myself, I can't help but compare Sun to another well-known enterprise IT vendor: IBM. In many ways, IBM is the perfect model of success for Sun to emulate. The problem is that Sun may have already traveled too far down the wrong road to reinvent itself in Big Blue's image.

Is open source enough?

Lately Sun has cast itself as, among other things, a leading open source software company. It has spent the last few years open-sourcing the Java platform, and earlier this year it purchased open source database vendor MySQL for $1 billion. Its stated aim is to make its entire software portfolio available as open source, backed by subscription service and support offerings.

But pundits are divided on the effects that a prolonged economic slump might have on the open source software business. On the one hand, author Andrew Keen asserts, "Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals." In other words, developers are likely to forsake open source as they scurry off to whatever paying jobs they can find. On the other hand, new Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst expects his company to "pick up quite a bit of new business where companies are looking to save money from what they are doing."

So where does this leave Sun? Superficially its software business model sounds just like Red Hat's, yet a closer look reveals something a little different. Sun's new top investor says that it is "progressively less of a server company and more of a software company." But Rich Sands, Sun's community marketing manager for Java SE, revealed an alternative assessment of the company's software strategy in a reply to Sun executive Simon Phipps's blog last week: