It is tough when you get off the spotlight. The dot in the dot.com bubble burst. Everybody saying you are a dead company. A very cool CEO stepping down. A young guy taking the helm (and with a ponytail...). A big shift towards open source, the coolest thing in town, but few talking about your new directions and improvements. Just assuming you are a walking dead.
That has been Sun Microsystems for the last six years. However, they lost market share for five in a row, then they turn it around. Now Sun has gained market share for four quarters in a row. IDC figures show Sun garnering 10.8% of all server sales in 2006 vs. 9.5% the year before (Gartner says pretty much the same). With a 2% market gain, while IBM and HP saw declines. In the firm's fiscal second quarter ending Dec. 31, the company finally got back in the black with earnings of 4 cents per share, its first profit since 2004...
That's a lot of good stuff and shows they are executing the plan. On top of it, there is open source. I am not advocating that their turnaround is all about open source. But there must be something about it...
Sun is the #1 contributor of open source code among companies. They had OpenOffice, then Solaris, then Java. A ton of code. Everything they are doing now smells of open source. They wandered a bit around OSS licenses, with Jonathan Schwartz saying GPL sucked in a famous OSBC keynote, then going for CDDL, then back to GPL (which, apparently, does not suck anymore ;-) It is never easy to do a U turn for a large company, but it is a sign of being smart. Change and adapt fast, as a startup.
They are thinking as an open source company, albeit big. And with JavaME, they are mobile. Big time, considering how many phones out there support JavaME. In a way, they are the biggest mobile open source company around...
Moreover, they are well positioned to gain from the GPL3 mess, the Red Hat vs. Oracle mess, the next mess (we are good at creating them in open source). OpenSolaris might well be what people will go for. It is OSS, it is stable and good (nobody ever questioned it), it has a company behind it that does not look it is going to disappear soon.
In a nutshell, open source allows them to sell more boxes... That's all they need to be successful. On top of it, they will start making money with subscriptions, which won't be marginal in their top line anymore. You can "use" open source in multiple ways. They are looking smart about how they are doing it.
Anyway, I have the feeling Sun is doing quite good. They have nice numbers, they are going in the right direction, they are taking advantage of the open source paradigm shift, they are well positioned in mobile (another paradigm shift). Unfortunately for them, the press does not like them anymore. Maybe if they built a cool smartphone...
