[geeks] [rescue] Ultra 5 OS

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 08:20:57AM -0400, Patrick Finnegan wrote:

>I think that just like a lot of tech companies that have disappeared in
>the past 2 years, at least part of Sun's problem may have been the
>failing economy.  Every company I have dealt with for the past two
>clusters we built at work made it very obvious that they were desperate
>for our money.

Sure, the get rich quick model has produced lots of them. In 2000, the idea
was to produce something as long as people bought them, and then sell the
company. The small payout was to be aquired, the brass ring as it were was
to IPO. 

Here the business model is to sell out early to double or tripple your money,
long before the technology is passed by, impractical, etc. Many startups
become Ponzi schemes, because instead of folding when they figure out that
they can't actually make what they were founded (often because they hire
kids in graduate school to do it), or their research was flawed, they just
sell more stock to new investors, grow the company and quitely fade away
before anyone notices that they sold a bill of goods. 

I think we discussed that here about a company that was building a cluster
system that had difficulties and the CEO left. After that they were unable
to find any funding to build new machines, so they folded.

In the late 1990's the busines model of telecoms, especially in celluar phones
was to get as many customers as you could, and then IPO. Each customer was 
thought to be worth $2-$3 (1-2 UKP) in valuation at IPO, no matter how much
money they spent. It all crashed when someone started looking at profits and
cost of operation.

Cluster systems are difficult to sell, and in order to stay in business
you need to be able to make a profit to support them until they are profitable.

IBM was already selling card equipment, scales, etc to be able to survive 
selling 5 computers, and Daimler 18 motor cars. The fact that those estimates
were way low started entire industries, but if they had been correct, the
companies would still be around. 

IMHO the whole problem goes back to DEC. They created the MIPS legend. 
Computers in the 1950's were rated by KIPS (thousands of instructions per
second) which later became MIPS (million). DEC sales policy was to push to
uninformed managers that KIPS were KIPS were KIPS. A 1 KIPS DEC PDP computer
was as fast as a 1 KIPS IBM mainframe. 

The DEC computers were a fraction of the cost of the IBM. They also were 
in real work a fraction of the speed. IBM lost a lot of sales that way.
In the end it killed DEC because the same MIPS that DEC had could be easily
duplicated by PC MIPS for 1/100th of the cost or less. 

This is why PC processors are rated by clock speed, not performance. 



>Also, I'm noting the irony of IBM's return to Open Source, if it's such
>a mistake. :)

I never said it was a mistake. I just think it's over rated.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation. 
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.