The New York Times has an article on Sun and whether it can survive and thrive after the dot com bubble. It goes into the usual arguments such as hardware becoming a commodity, the threat of Linux, and the increasing cost of developing and maintaining innovation in proprietary hardware. The overall tone of the article seems to be biased towards the current opinion that Sun is down for the count. However, the article does mention some positives for Sun, such as $5 Billion in cash and a large installed base of hardware and software specifically written for the Sun platform.

I think it's still too early to pass judgment on Sun. There is a segment of Sun's business that will be threatened by the Intel/Windows/Linux contingent, but that segment is going to be a commodity market. I do agree with the article in predicting that Dell will rule this segment, with its efficiency in manufacturing and distribution. However, I personally feel that there's going to be a segment of the market that will never go with the Intel/Windows/Linux model. Running a website is one thing, but if you're running data and processing intensive mission critical applications, going with the many Intel servers model is going to cause you more headaches in manageability and uptime than a centralized cluster of high end servers from Sun.

The article does raise an interesting question around Sun's ability to continue to innovate to differentiate themselves in the market. Gregory Papadopoulos (Sun CTO) mentions that if you consider the hardware and operating system segment to be a mature market, Sun has a bad business model, given its $2 Billion annual R&D budget. I tend to agree with Gregory that the hardware and operating system is still an immature industry, especially when you compaire it to the IBM mainframe world. Even Sun admits that it looks to mainframes for inspiration when designing high end Unix servers. I believe that there still is room for a significant amount of innovation and therefore an opportunity for Sun to take the lead and grab market share from both the low end and the high end.

So, is Sun down for the count? We'll have to see. Given the many lives that Sun has had over the years, I wouldn't be surprised if they survive and thrive again.