Sun Microsystems has asked all of its employees to take unpaid leave or to take their holidays during a temporary shutdown period next week (first week of July). A drastic cost cutting measure, this is the first time Sun has taken such an action.

All employees from servers to J2EE will be unreachable by telephone or email. The company claims to be shutting down inorder to save money for research and development.

Check out this old (but confirmed) article: Sun to close for a week.

I just phoned Sun directly, and confirmed the authenticity of this information.

Gary, I did the exact same thing when I first heard about it. Sounds incredible eh? Tough times calls for tough measures, I give Sun a lot of respect for rolling up its sleaves and doing what needed to be done. Its definitly a better alternative to layoffs!

Sure, but isn't that planned since the April of this year.
URL, also shows a date of April 2001.

yes,
  Its planned in April Only.

What's so drastic about it? This is nothing compared to standard summer vacation leave throughout Europe. My wife, who works for Boston University, gets this for the last week in december (except its payed leave). Sounds more pragmatic to me, since enough people taking vacation time simultaneously can cross the effectiveness threshold where no useful work can get done.

Is it a begining of the SunSet for loosely focussed sun microsystems empire. Trying to do everything from OS, hardware, Networking protocols to java, application servers without being number one in any of these fields.

What as opposed to MS who are doing exactly the same thing?

If you have it use it I say, don't divest yourself of IP just because you are diversified.

From the standard.com article:
"Mandatory vacation. Well, to use the a popular mantra of 2001, "at least it's not layoffs." News.com scored a Sun memo that declared, "All U.S. Sun offices will be shut down during the first week of July. ... Since July 4th is a company holiday, you should plan on taking vacation for July 2, 3, 5 and 6, so you will be paid for the entire week." No one seems to know the prognosis for countries that don't celebrate the 4th of July. "Sun's 2,800 workers in Britain are unlikely to be affected," wrote the Times of London, while the Financial Times said, "Workers overseas may also have to take mandatory holidays."

re-read the line "so you will be paid for the entire week".
The link is here: http://biz.yahoo.com/st/010426/24003.html
Its what everyone else has been doing, and since this has been news since April, its already been absorbed by the market etc.

Theres a discrepancy here.

One article says mandatory holiday and talks about being paid. Once says unpaid leave.

If it's the former, then this is no different to absolutely every manufacturing company in the world that has a "shutdown week." They use it for maintenance on the machines used in the processes of making things, so it's really not a big deal.

If it's unpaid leave then it's a very big deal. It would imply Sun were attempting to avoid cash flow problems, although there are many other possible explanations.

If you worked for Sun right now, would you be pleased about that, especially when you consider what they must spend on JavaOne! :-/

Chz

Tony

People,

This is a paid vacation. Only difference from a normal paid vacation is that this one is mandatory. One cannot choose to work in this mandatory vacation, and even if he does, he won't be paid for that. Definitely this step is to preserve cash, which I think is definitely a desirable solution over layoffs.

The implication then is that if you opt not to use up your holiday allowance in this mandatory vacation then you must take unpaid leave. That would be where the confusion arises.

It makes sense now.

Chz

Tony