Sun Microsystems (JAVA)

[chipguy]

Sun Microsystems slashes jobs in survival fight

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081114/sun_microsystems_layoffs.html?.v=22

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The economic downturn might be pushing Sun Microsystems Inc., one of the storied names in computing, to the brink of extinction.
The company's servers and software helped stimulate the Internet boom, and its engineering acumen is revered. But Sun never fully recovered from the previous financial crisis -- the dot-com meltdown -- and it has been steamrolled by big shifts in the way businesses buy their back-end computers.

Now Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun plans to slash up to 6,000 jobs, or 18 percent of its global work force, as it scrambles to cut costs to offset a devastating slump in sales of its high-end servers. Sales of those machines fell 27 percent in the latest quarter as banks and other big customers went under or couldn't get loans to buy the servers.