You Have to Stop to Change Direction

The bursting of the internet bubble was good for the computer industry. Many of us didn't like the medicine, but I can't remember a single customer upset at the idea of paying $20,000 for computing infrastructure that used to cost them $100,000. The price compression came from open source software, and a move toward general purpose servers, and resulted in companies formerly making 65% gross profit on products (Sun among them) facing a new reality. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Since then, Sun's built the biggest open source software business around (see this report for details), from platform software to application infrastructure (even a consumer product or two). Like Google and Microsoft, our products are both our ads and our revenue streams - our brands, and products, are recognized globally. On Monday last week, you saw us continue to convert that brand awareness to revenue - with the introduction of a full line of MySQL optimized systems. By our estimates, there are about 11,000,000 MySQL users on earth - our new systems can triple their application performance. So we've made free evaluation units available to MySQL users (via our Try and Buy programs). Click the image to the right to listen to Marten Mickos and John Fowler talk about the opportunities ahead. And that brings me to today. I was on a call last week with the Global CIO for one of our largest customers - one who was dram...

Date: November, 10 2008
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/you_have_to_stop_to

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