Tim Bray's evaluation of the predictive power of 9 factors of technology success

  1. Management Approval	- all over the map
  2. Standardization		- another signpost pointing nowhere
  3. Return on Investment	- apparent ROI has no predictive value
  4. Compelling Idea		- weak negative correlation between buzz factor and success.
  5. Investor Support		- not obviously a useful predictor

  6. Good Implementations	- a useful predictor
  7. Happy Programmers		- a useful predictor
  8. Technical Elegance		- a handy predictor
  9. 80/20 Point		- This one is a slam-dunk

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/03/TPM1

What I don't get about their open source strategy is how they're going to make money at it. Consulting? Selling complements?

It's doable, but it's tough, and it might be impossible for a company not built from the ground up for that purpose.

Open source is more respectable than free and it comes with a lot of benefits. Plus services are more profitable over the long-term than licensing.

But yeah, it's probably more difficult to ramp up that vibe in a mature company. Even internally.

Looking at the last quarterly reports, Sun's not doing so great.

What are they missing?

Once bit, twice shy. They charged a mint through the 90s and into the early 2000s and a lot of companies got burned paying off those contracts after the cash flow tightened up. Many of them refuse to do business with them.

They're also really banking on parallel processing (i.e. with CoolThreads) which will probably catch on with cloud services rather than directly with development houses. It takes a totally different mind-set to develop for 128 simultaneous threads.

They have some killer technology though. DTRace still blows my mind.