Sun Books a Small Loss on a Tiny Revenue Decline, Cuts Jobs
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The financial holding pattern with server and software maker Sun Microsystems continued in the fiscal third quarter, with the company reporting a relatively insignificant loss on a fractionally small decline in sales compared to the year-ago period. Sun is one of the few IT vendors that has to talk in four significant digits to express the changes in its quarterly results--something that certainly was not necessary in the heyday of the dot-com boom when Sun's sales were growing at 20 percent. READ MORE >

Solaris 10 5/08 Supports Legacy Containers, Xeon Features
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Late last week, after we had put The Unix Guardian to bed and then moved on to coverage of other platforms, Sun Microsystems announced that it has rolled out an update of its Solaris 10 Unix for Sparc and X64 platforms. The update, which is known as Solaris 10 5/08 even though it is coming out in April, comes out about seven months after the prior 8/07 update, which actually hit in September 2007, not August. (Go figure.) Anyway, the 5/08 update has some important features that Solaris shops have wanted for some time. READ MORE >

Sun Taps Splain to Run Microelectronics, Buys Montalvo Carcass
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A little more than a month ago, Sun Microsystems announced that David Yen, who was in charge of its Sparc processor development efforts off and on for many years, was leaving the company to take a job at Juniper Networks. Sun announced this week that it has tapped Mike Splain, a heavy hitter in the chip world who was given the interim job in addition to his duties as chief technology officer for Sun's Systems Group. READ MORE >

As I See It: That Competitive Bug
by Victor Rozek

It has become an article of faith that competitiveness is inherently good, historically inevitable, and the fountainhead of economic dominance. It's rare that business-related nouns appear in print without their default companion adjective 'competitive.' The job market, global markets, wages, and prices all share the same pugnacious descriptor. As any first-year business student will attest: in order to be successful, companies must pursue competitive advantage by developing competitive solutions and executing competitive strategies. READ MORE >