|
|
|
|
|
|
by emmelaich
3213 days ago
|
|
|
I always sensed a great tension between the engineers and the business people at Sun, to the detriment of both. The business didn't know how to drive and target sales, and the engineers built brilliant things (ZFS, dtrace, mdb, zones, internal high availability, firewall*) that customers weren't asking for. [edited to add firewall, that first gen that no-one used because it was so complex] |
|
|
Business is fundamentally uncertain, and decomposing failure into avoidable and unavoidable factors is very very hard. This is even harder in industries dominated by network externalities like computer platforms.
On the other hand: if engineering wasn't serving the stated business purpose (things that customers want, at least as far as business can see) but doing semi-academic research on the company dime... well, it's an indirect misappropriation of funds, however cool the results turned out.
Analogy: Sugarcube Industries is in the business of farm built infrastructure and its flagship product is a barn that can comfortably house N horses cutting down on injuries, promoting weight gain by proper thermal environment. I don't know much about horses, bear with me.
Engineering is asked to design such a horse barn. Maybe it's fundamentally impossible to fix heat flows in such and such weather or idiotic in general to try and improve horse health by those means. Maybe business even understood market research wrong, and what people wanted was barns with hooks where farmstaff can hang horse ponchos that will be manually deployed in times of need.
It's a bad look on engineering if instead of delivering the best horse barn on the market, they come up with a three-storey optimized IVF-incubator-horse feeding operation.
----
Unix (a decades-long project whose capital costs are inestimable when considering all the failed companies and free labor) nearly lost to Windows NT because the latter had hooks where sysadmins could hang those needed ponchos.