Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
If you want to take the bet off people and go even further back than 7-15-2010,their were only two key assets http://www.oracle.com/sun/letter.html . -- This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
interesting. a rising tide lifts all boats, I hear ya. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
On 8/22/2010 5:47 PM, Jason wrote: On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 4:42 PM, John Plocherjohn.ploc...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/8/20 Matthias Pfütznermatth...@pfuetzner.de Let me add some numbers... ... that a high percentage might be working on Solaris might provide us with an approach to a number close to 1000 engineers... Of your 1000 engineers, maybe 100 were the senior leaders in innovation, vision, drive and ability. At Sun, the makeup of that club was exceedingly dynamic, to be sure, but it was a meritocracy - if you were *good* and had job/product/whatever performance to prove it, membership was open; nobody had to leave to make room for you. From what I have seen (and I have no visibility into the current numbers or membership), a significant number of the distinguished engineers and fellows that were there when Oracle took over have left. 30%? 50%? More? I don't know either, but the Names that are making the headlines all come from that small club... IM(ns)HO, losing that many top performing engineers to the competition will do more to harm Oracle in both the short and long run than anything that might conceivably happen due to premature product and feature exposure due to open source community involvement. Nobody really cares if a company lays off a bunch of its low level staff, but losing half of the technical leadership of a technical company is a disaster. Oracle may have bought the trademarks and rights to the code, but the real value of an acquisition is in the minds of those who produced the products in the first place - long term engineering excellence isn't a commodity that can be cheaply purchased or easily duplicated. Don't forget that the easiest way to make the books look better in the short term is to get rid of all those expensive engineers - you will immediately see a 10%-15% rise in profitability because you no longer have to pay the cost of development. Of course, after 24 to 36 months of coasting, you will be dead, but given the Street's myopic focus and short term memory, who cares? Just buy some other company and start everything over again... Of course, acquisition as your growth strategy has yet to be shown to work in the long terms as well... Not really. *Properly done* acquisition has a well-proven method of maintaining growth and a competitive advantage that larger companies often find hard to do organically. Cisco has a darned good track record of doing this. So do a couple of major financial institutions (even the current downturn notwithstanding). And, I think Warren Buffet would like to have a word with you on your opinion. That said, many of today's merges/buyouts/acquisitions are done for reasons other than growth, or are bungled badly. Time will tell if the rather pittance Oracle paid for Sun will prove to be well-spent. -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
We are sys admins of some Sun muchines we've sold to a customer in the Sun era. A T5120 with a ZFS mirror, had a disk fault, causing cyclic reset of the machine. Our hardware guy ran to the customer, disabled the disk and moved it out of the machine. Upon reboot the machine started normally, with the remaining disk. The customer had Sun Silver support. We called Oracle support to have a substitution disk (we had no spare part of that size): - 4 hours with a lady trying to find the support contract... - Finally we could talk with a technician, whose 1st response to the problem was: ...why do you run such a shitty hardware? why don't you just change it? (luckily we were not in open conversation with the customer..) - After sometimes of discussion, they told us they would send a techincian to put the new disk.2 days later! What if it was a mainboard crash??? - So, our hardware guy had hard times to convince them we did not need the technician but just the disk! We can do the work by ourselves!...but they did not wantdo you think I want an unknown technician to come to my customer and work on the machine??? At last, after almost one day, we had Oracle to send us the disk the next day, and we could resilver the machine Not much different than my experiences as an HP/Compaq end user over the years, even when the part is designated customer replaceable. You were lucky to get one so fast. I have waited weeks for a replacement disk - no stock available. I solved the issue by keeping a spares inventory. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
Let me add some numbers... We know, that Sun was one of the IT companies, that spend an enormous percentage of it's revenue into engineering... More than 10 percent. If, and that's now a very crude approach, we then assume, that that relates to 10% of the costs also, we can assume, that more than 10% of Sun's employees have been engineers. At the end Sun had still more than 3 employees, so assuming, that a high percentage might be working on Solaris might provide us with an approach to a number close to 1000 engineerhe s... All very crude and rough speculation, I can't determine those numbers. So why do you try to convince us of something that you don't even know ? What's your motive behind blindly defending Oracle with made up numbers in an OpenSolaris mailing list ? Hoping to close any deals here ? Wrong place, wrong time. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
2010/8/20 Matthias Pfützner matth...@pfuetzner.de Let me add some numbers... ... that a high percentage might be working on Solaris might provide us with an approach to a number close to 1000 engineers... Of your 1000 engineers, maybe 100 were the senior leaders in innovation, vision, drive and ability. At Sun, the makeup of that club was exceedingly dynamic, to be sure, but it was a meritocracy - if you were *good* and had job/product/whatever performance to prove it, membership was open; nobody had to leave to make room for you. From what I have seen (and I have no visibility into the current numbers or membership), a significant number of the distinguished engineers and fellows that were there when Oracle took over have left. 30%? 50%? More? I don't know either, but the Names that are making the headlines all come from that small club... IM(ns)HO, losing that many top performing engineers to the competition will do more to harm Oracle in both the short and long run than anything that might conceivably happen due to premature product and feature exposure due to open source community involvement. Nobody really cares if a company lays off a bunch of its low level staff, but losing half of the technical leadership of a technical company is a disaster. Oracle may have bought the trademarks and rights to the code, but the real value of an acquisition is in the minds of those who produced the products in the first place - long term engineering excellence isn't a commodity that can be cheaply purchased or easily duplicated. Don't forget that the easiest way to make the books look better in the short term is to get rid of all those expensive engineers - you will immediately see a 10%-15% rise in profitability because you no longer have to pay the cost of development. Of course, after 24 to 36 months of coasting, you will be dead, but given the Street's myopic focus and short term memory, who cares? Just buy some other company and start everything over again... -John ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 4:42 PM, John Plocher john.ploc...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/8/20 Matthias Pfützner matth...@pfuetzner.de Let me add some numbers... ... that a high percentage might be working on Solaris might provide us with an approach to a number close to 1000 engineers... Of your 1000 engineers, maybe 100 were the senior leaders in innovation, vision, drive and ability. At Sun, the makeup of that club was exceedingly dynamic, to be sure, but it was a meritocracy - if you were *good* and had job/product/whatever performance to prove it, membership was open; nobody had to leave to make room for you. From what I have seen (and I have no visibility into the current numbers or membership), a significant number of the distinguished engineers and fellows that were there when Oracle took over have left. 30%? 50%? More? I don't know either, but the Names that are making the headlines all come from that small club... IM(ns)HO, losing that many top performing engineers to the competition will do more to harm Oracle in both the short and long run than anything that might conceivably happen due to premature product and feature exposure due to open source community involvement. Nobody really cares if a company lays off a bunch of its low level staff, but losing half of the technical leadership of a technical company is a disaster. Oracle may have bought the trademarks and rights to the code, but the real value of an acquisition is in the minds of those who produced the products in the first place - long term engineering excellence isn't a commodity that can be cheaply purchased or easily duplicated. Don't forget that the easiest way to make the books look better in the short term is to get rid of all those expensive engineers - you will immediately see a 10%-15% rise in profitability because you no longer have to pay the cost of development. Of course, after 24 to 36 months of coasting, you will be dead, but given the Street's myopic focus and short term memory, who cares? Just buy some other company and start everything over again... Of course, acquisition as your growth strategy has yet to be shown to work in the long terms as well... ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
You (Richard L. Hamilton) wrote: On 19 Aug 2010, at 15:43, Rick Ramsey wrote: I've been with Sun since 89 and our great engineers have always moved on. There's only room for a few at the top, after all. It's actually a healthy movement, since it gives younger engineers with fresh approaches a change to step up. Indeed. Sun had just under 30,000 employees when Oracle took over, IIRC. The list of 'big names' who have left, while all incredibly talented people, does nonetheless represent a pretty small drop in the ocean of Sun's talent pool. Cheeri, Calum. Certainly I don't wish to suggest that choosing to stay or go corresponds to talent or ethics or any other particular attribute. I only mean to suggest that there is the appearance that enough talented people that were likely to be able to write their own ticket anywhere chose to go that it suggests the possibility that some felt that their preferred approach to solving problems or creating something new could better be pursued elsewhere. Let me add some numbers... We know, that Sun was one of the IT companies, that spend an enormous percentage of it's revenue into engineering... More than 10 percent. If, and that's now a very crude approach, we then assume, that that relates to 10% of the costs also, we can assume, that more than 10% of Sun's employees have been engineers. At the end Sun had still more than 3 employees, so assuming, that a high percentage might be working on Solaris might provide us with an approach to a number close to 1000 engineers... All very crude and rough speculation, I can't determine those numbers. So, 10 people leaving are 1 percent. That's a way below average number in IT. Most companies have a way higher employee turn-around number than that... So, trying to derive anything from that is worse than reading in the coffeepot... ;-) That's my thinking... And: Being a top engineer never should provide you with an eternal such position in the same company. You're blocking others to achieve the same. It's healthy also to remove the top percentage, so that the average can grow. Otherwise, as long as a company does not grow, there would not be any incentive or opportunity for the close-to-top engineers to even try to reach the top... So, never try to predict the future. Or: Ask yourself, why no-one is even thinking about complaining, that Greg Papadopoulos no longer is the CTO? If you believe in Top-to-Bottom brightness being an indication for quality of products or rate of innovation, having Greg leaving should have send thrills down your veins, because following that logic laid out here, it would have indicated, that there won't be ANY INNOVATION at all coming from the former Sun part... Think about that reasoning... ;-) Matthias -- Matthias Pfützner | Tel.: +49 700 PFUETZNER | Im Kunstwerk muß das Chaos Lichtenbergstr.73 | mailto:matth...@pfuetzner.de | durch den Flor der Ordnung D-64289 Darmstadt | AIM: pfuetz, ICQ: 300967487 | schimmern. Germany | http://www.pfuetzner.de/matthias/ |Novalis ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
The move Sun-Oracle is casuing serious problems for mid-range customers resellers, here in Italy. Listen to this (happened few weeks ago). We are sys admins of some Sun muchines we've sold to a customer in the Sun era. A T5120 with a ZFS mirror, had a disk fault, causing cyclic reset of the machine. Our hardware guy ran to the customer, disabled the disk and moved it out of the machine. Upon reboot the machine started normally, with the remaining disk. The customer had Sun Silver support. We called Oracle support to have a substitution disk (we had no spare part of that size): - 4 hours with a lady trying to find the support contract... - Finally we could talk with a technician, whose 1st response to the problem was: ...why do you run such a shitty hardware? why don't you just change it? (luckily we were not in open conversation with the customer..) - After sometimes of discussion, they told us they would send a techincian to put the new disk.2 days later! What if it was a mainboard crash??? - So, our hardware guy had hard times to convince them we did not need the technician but just the disk! We can do the work by ourselves!...but they did not wantdo you think I want an unknown technician to come to my customer and work on the machine??? At last, after almost one day, we had Oracle to send us the disk the next day, and we could resilver the machine Is this hardware support??? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
This is getting to the point that I'm even starting to feel the pattern here, and I'm not one to proclaim bad news quickly. http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/815946 Since then, a couple of the names the poster speculated about have moved on. Adam Leventhal (co-D-trace creator) has left the building. http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/ -- This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
Well when the rising tide pulls back to sea, we will see what is left of Solaris proper. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
I've been with Sun since 89 and our great engineers have always moved on. There's only room for a few at the top, after all. It's actually a healthy movement, since it gives younger engineers with fresh approaches a change to step up. No question that Oracle is going to be different than Sun, but it's not a Greek Tragedy. A lot of us are glad to be there. Rick On 8/19/2010 8:34 AM, me wrote: Well when the rising tide pulls back to sea, we will see what is left of Solaris proper. ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
On 19 Aug 2010, at 15:43, Rick Ramsey wrote: I've been with Sun since 89 and our great engineers have always moved on. There's only room for a few at the top, after all. It's actually a healthy movement, since it gives younger engineers with fresh approaches a change to step up. Indeed. Sun had just under 30,000 employees when Oracle took over, IIRC. The list of 'big names' who have left, while all incredibly talented people, does nonetheless represent a pretty small drop in the ocean of Sun's talent pool. Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer Oracle Corporation Ireland Ltd. mailto:calum.ben...@oracle.com Solaris Desktop Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Oracle Corp. ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] place yer bets on who leaves next...
On 19 Aug 2010, at 15:43, Rick Ramsey wrote: I've been with Sun since 89 and our great engineers have always moved on. There's only room for a few at the top, after all. It's actually a healthy movement, since it gives younger engineers with fresh approaches a change to step up. Indeed. Sun had just under 30,000 employees when Oracle took over, IIRC. The list of 'big names' who have left, while all incredibly talented people, does nonetheless represent a pretty small drop in the ocean of Sun's talent pool. Cheeri, Calum. Certainly I don't wish to suggest that choosing to stay or go corresponds to talent or ethics or any other particular attribute. I only mean to suggest that there is the appearance that enough talented people that were likely to be able to write their own ticket anywhere chose to go that it suggests the possibility that some felt that their preferred approach to solving problems or creating something new could better be pursued elsewhere. Now maybe the culture under the new management is more congenial to some than to others, maybe it's all perfectly normal. And of course a desire to maintain a professional demeanor and preserve valuable relationships may prevent those that left from discussing in detail their reasons for leaving. But the bottom line is that it's rather easy, even for someone that's not a recruiter or normally pays much attention to such things, to identify a considerable amount of talent with Solaris internals, Java, etc, that's not beholden to the successor of the company where those originated. That plus an apparent indifference to community other than strictly on their own terms (which look suspiciously like how much money have you put in my pocket recently?, i.e. profit is necessary, but being so simplistic is oh so quarterly-report minded), doesn't even make good sense from the perspective of a _rational_ control freak (if there is such a thing). Now...if I see that overall relationships with .edu's (how many courses on OS design are switching to/from using Solaris as an example; how many students can get their hands on Solaris in class) and entrepreneurs and startups (those who are growing, not just those who've already arrived, i.e. the Fortune 500) aren't deteriorating, maybe I'm all wrong about how short-sighted the new owner's approach is. _If_ I'd even be able to see that. For me, even what remains is better than nothing. I can't abide a black box; no user-servicable parts inside is a good way to alienate me quickly. I can usually troubleshoot better than first-line vendor support from any given vendor, esp. given the tools, which can be a better deal both for who I'm working for and for the vendor. Now...what I use at work, I'd prefer to use at home, too. I can't reasonably spend more than low three digits US$ per year on support at home, for two small systems. But it would still be cost-effective for the vendor if I could view at least a privacy-redacted version of the bug database, and submit bug reports (without any particular expectation of a personal response). That way, they get information at a level of quality that probably exceeds most initial bug reports, which should end up saving them money. I can't be the only programmer/systems administrator crossover with enough exposure to internals to do some of their own troubleshooting. Even if we never donated a line of code, that talent pool probably has a decent dollar value in terms of higher quality bug reports, _occasionally_ even down to the relevant piece of code (and not ruling out the possibility of a suggested fix). Nor are we so clueless as to be unable to implement obvious additions (like more library routines) that might enable others to more easily port apps to Solaris. From what I recall, apps actually have something to do with selling systems (see the Wikipedia entry on VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet program). An OS that runs more apps, invites more people to become familiar with it, sells more systems and more support contracts (money in the pockets of the vendor's shareholders). A climate where secrecy and lawsuits are more visible means of pursuing profit than collegial creativity and encouraging customers to ask more informed questions, alienates more developers these days...even some of the commercially successful ones. When large established institutions that get all warm and fuzzy about support contracts start to appreciate the value of open source (which has been happening!), it's clear that the market has gotten a little more sophisticated than just looking for a big name that offers one-stop shopping for everything from the power cord to the database. It's easy: sales-developers-community Faking it on the community part is...better than nothing at all, but really not good enough anymore. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list
