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Sun seems to have made some poor business decisions ... | 438 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Sun seems to have made some poor business decisions ...
Authored by: Tkilgore on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 10:23 PM EDT
But whose decisions were they, actually? Who really knows? No doubt that Schwarz
was the CEO and was the public face and set the tone for a lot of things. This
means, of course, that he was "responsible" in the sense that the
finger could be pointed at him and he could be thrown overboard. That is one of
the parts of the CEO job description. But were those actually his decisions?
Again, who really knows?

There is also no doubt that Sun had a very tough situation. The company was
caught right between two diametrically opposed forces. On one side were those
(mainly stock market types) who wanted Sun to monetize all of its assets with a
vengeance, in a way similar to what Oracle seems to want to do. On the other
side were those who support or contribute to Free Software and/or mistrusted
proprietary UNIX because of the history of fragmentation. This second group did
not contain so many moneybags, but it has been in control of a lot of IT
purchasing and system rollouts over the years and was more influential over
purchases than the moneybags ever seem to have comprehended.

Sun was a company which was in the unenviable position of needing to please both
sides, or at least of needing not to displease either side too much, and so the
company ended up in the bad situation of pleasing or earning the trust and
respect of neither.

I don't believe that I would have wanted to be in the position that Schwarz was
in. It does not appear to me that there were any good choices remaining by the
time he was put in as CEO.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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