S. Fermigier.

He has an inability to manage large projects and organizations, just take a look at the problems we’re having with 5.1. His organization is fraught with politics (Drizzl had to happen *outside* our group, and Marten plays favorite by promoting his friends like Zack, even though he was a terrible engineering leader).

Sun needs to focus in on making its existing product sets run well, hold the MySQL team accountable to execution. That’s where we need to start, not by giving people fancy new titles to cover up the chaos.

I feel this acutely as an advocate for OSGi, which is still under attack from parts of Sun even though other parts (i.e. Glassfish) have embraced it. But this is not the only example.

I wouldn’t concentrate only on storage, but I’d be looking internally for other broad-thinkers like the Fishworks crew that sees how they can bring the combination of internal expertise, IP and capability into unique, capable and innovative integrated products. Sun’s always had all the pieces, and has even put them together with their consultants often enough, but turning those efforts into product I think is where it can be truly unique and go far beyond what we’ve seen.

Unleashing Java into an independent body wouldn’t hurt either, as they still have the bulk of influence and expertise, but I don’t know that is nearly as critical any more. it’s open enough for anyone that serious about doing things with it.

It’s the next gen of appliance. System appliances that take on whole segments of the IT stack. Lego bricks to build both small infrastructures and Lego blocks to build pieces of clouds if you want to.

IBM is the only other one that comes close, and they need to protect all that Global Services revenue, not commoditize it.

To go after websphere and oracle -You need more than technology and talk about free. You need to have a different kind of lock-in. in terms of “One Stop Shop” , “Relationship Mgmt” and Yealy deals. There is a reason Oracle buys a company each month. To cover the full IT Shop.

on opensource: A key thing for success in Complementary business models is Lock in. You give something free to enable a sale elsewhere.The lockin will make sure that the elsewhere is somewhere in your world and not anywhere else. Sun micro did not monetize on java to the extent that it could have – as the elsewhere was anywhere(IBM ,BEA etc).