There were other signs warning that things were unhealthy within the Sun camp; some of the most clearly seen indications are from within the Open Source world, where Sun has recently recanted it's "Open" beliefs, with the closing of the code and now charging for the new version of the "Star Office" Office Suite. Sure, It's a great product and it's fantastic that it runs on Unix boxes, but with projects like K-Office, Wine and Open Office, who would want to pay for an Microsoft Office knock-off? In addition to this firm new direction on the "StarOffice", there has been mixed signals from Sun in regard to the open Solaris version for Intel. Here, instead of just closing the source, Sun apparently thinks that the version detracts from the sales of their own hardware. (Gee guys, perhaps the fact that a loaded x86 server costs less then one of your workstations could have something to do with your falling sales?)

Is this just abject speculation? Well, Graham Lovell, director of product marketing at Sun seems to echo these speculations in his comments on ending the Intel support:

"We are focusing more on our bottom line.. We need to focus on immediate revenue where possible."

It seems that even restricting new releases to just the 64-bit Itanium Intel Chipset would offer a better consolation then Sun's offer to continue supporting Solaris 8 for the "next seven years" (Lovell), but apparently there has been a falling out politically between the Intel Itanium folks and the developers at Sun so all Itanium development ceased prior to the January discontinuation announcement.

Sun's schizophrenic existence, caught in the riptide of being both a software and hardware vendor has created eccentric behavior. With StarOffice, Sun is a software developer and is planning to sell Star Office 6 for around $100 a copy to compete with Microsoft's killer application, Office. But then when it comes to Solaris on Intel, Sun would rather go for the juicy hardware commissions instead of closing Solaris 9 on Intel and licensing it. The later suggestion would parlay Sun's reputation in the Unix would to a more affordable platform for the smaller mid-range organizations - the bulk of the industry.

This superiority attitude can be clearly seen with the newest sales strategy of the Sun team: I can even see it with my local representative. I call up and ask for a quote on a Sun Fire V880 (not an inexpensive machine ranging from $30,000 - $120,000.) and what do I get in response? I am told to email what I want spec'd and I get a sales pitch for the new Star Kitty. I emailed my request for pricing nearly two weeks ago and I finally get a call back - not on the pricing, but on a request for a meeting to talk about the Star Kitty. I'm not even interested in the damned thing, but the Sun guys know that my organization has the cash to get one, so instead of being helped getting what I need, all my local sun reps are interested in doing is helping get themselves what they need - sales.

Now, I'm not IBM person - I have only a few ancient HPUX boxes in the shop, but it seems to me that IBM has worked out the personality conflict that Sun suffers with; they're a hardware vendor. Sure, they do have their own OS', but they've also ported Linux to run on every piece of hardware so eventually they don't have to be in the software business - if they don't want to. It seems that Sun could learn a lesson or two from this - or find themselves continuing down this path of self-destruction and, well, going Nova.