Sun Microsystems - Coursework Example

The company was then selling its own servers developed by its own processors. Till 2001, the business was doing pretty well. However, during the economic downturn of 2001 when companies were looking for ways to cut on their costs, companies like Google shifted to cheap servers provided by other vendors. To adapt itself, Sun started to develop servers on third party platforms. From thereon they started losing on their revenues as many companies had already developed their own servers. In the year 2010, the company was taken over by Oracle.

In the ‘Transformational model’, input and output consist of two types of components. The system input and outputs generally fall under the categories of labour, power, energy, information, decisions and money. In case of Sun Microsystems, the important planning inputs have been information, decisions, knowledge, skill set of the employees and the capital. Other influential factors which are significant in instigating the production process are competition, social facilities, technological and architectural infrastructures.

The desirable outputs have been servers, workstations, data centres and software solutions for enterprises. However, in the process, Sun Microsystems was incurring higher cost which has been assumed as the less desirable output of the process. US hardware and software industry is huge with big players like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HP and Apple. The political environment of US is encouraging for the innovations, which is the biggest source of competitive advantage in this industry. One major disadvantage which these companies have to face higher labour cost.

As a consequence, these companies outsource a large number of activities to other countries, worldwide. With the passing of recession, the hardware and software industry in US is still in its recovery phase. Although the US economy is recovering at a faster pace, it would need some time to reach the peak stage. With technological