[rbanffy]

Not sure anyone could save the company, but he didn't help one single bit.

Sun never decided whether they were a hardware company of a software company. They had great hardware and software, but couldn't make much money with the latter. Failing to recognize software as a way to sell THEIR hardware was the biggest issue. When they decided to launch x86 workstations, I knew they were doomed. When they exited the workstation business, I knew it wouldn't be long.

When you destroy all the on-ramps to your highway, it's a matter of time until the toll booths are empty.

[cryptonector]

Sun made a bunch of serious mistakes in 2002 before Jonathan that it never fully recovered from:

  - not making a deal with Google
  
  - the [temporary] cancellation
    (suspension) of Solaris 8 on x86
  
  - the closing of Sun professional
    Services

These three mistakes were ultimately the ones that ended Sun, but there were many many other horrible mistakes along the way, like:

  - sitting on its laurels and doing
    vendor lock-in monetization of
     - J2ME
     - SPARC
     - Sun Directory Service
  
  - not building an Active Directory
    clone
  
  - spending $1bn on MySQL (wtf)
  
  - ...

Then Oracle overreacted to the Greenbytes' shipping of ZFS dedup before Oracle and killed OpenSolaris when OpenSolaris was the only hope for Solaris itself. And now Solaris is a tiny operation.

[asveikau]

Solaris got disrupted by Linux, and their hardware was disrupted by Intel machines. When Linux on x86 is working well, there's little reason to shell out money for Solaris on SPARC.

They had Java but that's also challenging to monetize. When it was introduced it was novel to have a portable C-like workhorse that has GC and bounds checking, but now there are many free options for that.

[cryptonector]

> They had Java but that's also challenging to monetize.

Apple killed J2ME with the iPhone.

Every success story Sun had was defeated by others. SPARC by Intel, Solaris by Linux (really, Google), and Java by the iPhone. Ditto for smaller products like Sun Directory Service.

[dboreham]

Sun actually lasted much longer than they would have except that Linux was terrible, basically unusable for commercial purposes until about 2005.

[rconti]

I worked at several x86 Linux + SPARC Solaris shops between 1999 and say 2011. Linux was always on the app servers, and Solaris on the DB servers.

The Sun hardware was just better, more robust, and the machines tended to have hot-swappable bits. Better support for fast storage. Hot-plug in Linux was bad and took time to get good. The hardware was cheap, and took time to get good. Ditto driver support. It just got better and better until there was no reason to buy Sun.

And then Oracle bought Sun, and there was now a reason to _avoid_ Sun.

[kstrauser]

And here we were running a large regional ISP on it in 1997.

[rconti]

In the PNW, eskimo.com was using Sun machines at least in 1994 when I joined, and I assume for some years earlier. Oz.net was using Irix on SGI machines :)

[kstrauser]

That stuff was surely popular, too! But we were running LAMP stacks in the late 90s to host customer content on cheap x86 boxes, and it that was an enormously popular hosting solution for many years before 2005.

Sun boxes were very nice machines, but an entry level Sun Fire V480 debuted for $20K, and that would buy a whole tabletop of x86 servers in tower cases.

There was a much greater variety of plausible server options back then, to be sure. I'm mainly arguing against the idea that Linux+x86 was useless until 2005 or so. I had personally worked in 5 different ISP/hosting companies by then which all used that exact combination.

[rconti]

Oh, absolutely, fair point. I used linux exclusively on the desktop from 95-02.

Even commercially; I worked at a decent-sized digital services company in 99-02 that, from the day I started, had 2 ALR 6x6 pentium pro machines as database servers (6 proc, 6 hot swap drive bays). When they crashed, our main issues were with really long-running `fsck` because journaling filesystems were not a thing.

All the app servers were white label intel boxes. We had issues, sure -- the one that comes to mind chiefly is that we were doing IP-based virtual hosting (I don't think name-based virtual hosting was a thing yet), and Linux seemed to get unstable and randomly drop the virtual interfaces once you exceeded maybe a few hundred per NIC, and you'd have to restart the i/f to fix it. I don't think these were behind LBs yet, but I can't really remember.

All that stuff was on RedHat, the first time of 2 or 3 times that Redhat went through the v7 -> v8 -> v9 period :)

Even in much later years (eg, 2008-ish), I remember that too many vendors (HP, Dell, etc) would ship these prosumer grade RAID cards that absolutely fell over (locked up) at sustained high util %. You could (probably correctly) argue that was because we didn't pony up for the true high-end x86 hardware, but the fact that enterprise server companies shipped this stuff at all meant it made the x86 option look less robust compared to the big iron.

[rbanffy]

> When Linux on x86 is working well, there's little reason to shell out money for Solaris on SPARC

They still had the high-end gear. I remember SPARC boxes with more than 60 sockets and mainframe-like partitions (and mainframe-like availability). And, if you wanted to develop for those, it’d make sense to buy a SPARC workstation running the same OS.

Sun could be in the same niche IBM carved for itself in the POWER and mainframe space, but while IBM continued investing in POWER and Z, Oracle shut down SPARC development.

[hylaride]

It seems most things in tech (OS's, databases, languages, etc) eventually become a race to zero unless you can provide some long-term service-level support for it the way most cloud computing vendors have.

Sun should have probably bought Joyent and gotten their rather huge corporate client base (financial institutions, etc) onto it, but even then it was probably too little too late.

[hypercube33]

I'm getting into the history of Palm who seemed to be the pass around project for 20 years before hp burnt it to the ground. Are there any good books or something about the full history? Feels like all of these companies are woven together like a bowl of spaghetti...sun, oracle, google, apple, etc

[rbanffy]

> eventually become a race to zero

Free and open source software commoditised almost every sliver of the market. A lot of the investment in cloud and AI is to recapture some margins by using access to training materials and high capital investments as entry barriers.

[cryptonector]

Joyent was a reaction to Sun's acquisition by Oracle.

[cryptonector]

> Sun never decided whether they were a hardware company of a software company.

Ouch. And actually they were a _systems_ company. Their storage appliance product was fantastic, and their UltraSPARC systems (the systems; forget the CPU) were also fantastic. Sun was the first systems company to prioritize space and power consumption -- they were really empathetic to folks who build and pay for data centers!

But no one seemed to understand how awesome their position was circa 2007 regarding systems design, and their advantages were allowed to fizzle.

Larry Ellison doesn't understand mindshare -- the very thing that made Oracle successful. He only understands lock-in. He doesn't understand that you need to build mindshare first. He's not alone in that. This is why Sun saw starts in SPARC when it was pretty much garbage. Sure, UltraSPARC was neat, but still way too slow. It showcased great ideas and execution, but SPARC was just dead, so what was the point besides an obscene waste of resources?!

[rbanffy]

> SPARC when it was pretty much garbage

I don’t remember that time. SPARC was pretty awesome when it came out. Eventually it was surpassed by others, but that happened later.

[sys_64738]

> Larry Ellison doesn't understand mindshare

Given Larry is the third richest person on the planet, he understands everything way better than us.

[rbanffy]

Never underestimate the value of luck and of being in the right place at the right time. Larry doesn’t have to understand everything - he pays people to understand the things he doesn’t. His main expertise now is with racing boats.

[sys_64738]

If that makes you feel better then good luck with that. I'd love to have his luck then.

[rbanffy]

Remember he bought Sun in part to be able to kill MySQL? I do.

[cryptonector]

Oracle was kinda sponsored by the U.S. government initially, IIUC (but maybe that's just conspiracy theories floating around?). They had the best SQL RDBMS for a long time, which created mindshare. Back then Larry knew better or didn't think of milking his customers, either way Oracle back then built customers and mindshare. Eventually Oracle began milking their customers. The Sun acquisition experience seems to bear out the idea that they are no longer interested in building mindshare, just acquiring products they can milk, then milk them for as long as possible, and let them die of attrition.

[mrcwinn]

Oracle is here. Sun is not. Sorry, what exactly does Larry Ellison not understand?

[cryptonector]

Oracle is here, but all new DBs are PG or Couch/Duck/WhateverDB. When was the last time you heard of someone choosing Oracle for a new greenfield app? It doesn't happen. No one wants to be beholden to Oracle. Oracle is just milking their cow and eventually it will run dry.

[rbanffy]

Open source licenses is one. He tried to (chuckles) kill MYSQL (laughter). After paying a billion for it (ROTFL)

[varunnrao]

I think what ultimately led to Sun's downfall is a combination of what ESR [1] and joelonsoftware [2] have previously covered.

1. Sun didn't become the defacto desktop platform because they lost out to WinNT. So they lost out on the consumer market. 2. Custom server hardware and software makers like Sun and Silicon Graphics were the fashion till Google and later on Facebook came around and built their own data centers with consumer hardware and specialized software to overcome the inherent unreliability of that hardware. And anyway ever since web-based software became a thing your device is practically a console a la Chromebooks. So they lost the server market.

The only option left was to serve the high end HPC market like labs or even banks but that didn't make business sense since that's increasingly niche because those customers would eventually also want the effects of commoditization.

[1] - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6279 [2] - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/

[cryptonector]

The real losses were against Windows 2000 (specifically Active Directory) and to Linux.

The loss to Linux was greatly accelerated by Sun's failure to make a deal with Google for Google to use Solaris on their servers. The story I heard was that Scott wanted a server count for the license while Google believed server count was a top secret datum.

If Sun had made a deal with Google in 2002 and worked on OpenSolaris starting in 2001, then Linux might not have been quite the success it became.

[rbanffy]

It wasn’t Google’s investment that made Linux a viable OS for enterprise applications. Google using Solaris would have made little difference.

Active Directory was a huge win for Microsoft. We’ll see them milk that product for generations. Sun could have captured a part of that, but it’d need to compete against Microsoft when 99.9% of the clients using AD were Microsoft. I doubt they would succeed.

Another fun alt-history branch is the one Sun manages to sell thousands of Amigas as low-end Unix workstations, moving Unix down into the personal computer space, and saving Commodore.

Sadly, none of that happened and we live in the crappiest timeline.

[TMWNN]

>Another fun alt-history branch is the one Sun manages to sell thousands of Amigas as low-end Unix workstations, moving Unix down into the personal computer space, and saving Commodore.

This never would have happened with the 3000UX, and various websites are guilty of passing on nonsense (like Sun actually having designed the darn thing). Amiga by this time had already fallen behind Apple's 68K offerings. There is no time in history when the 3000UX was competitive with Sun's own products. By this time Sun had three separate offerings (SunOS on SPARC, SunOS on 80386, and PC/IX on 80386) and would not have added another which, again, was technologically behind and incompatible with Sun's own products.

[cryptonector]

Maybe. Sun could have acquired Commodore in 1984 or 1985 and Dave Miner and the blitter/copper, and gone a bit more the SGI route.

Also, Commodore did the first SVR4 port outside the Labs, and Sun ended up doing the first commercially successful port of SVR4 (Solaris). So it's not that crazy.

(I think the SVR4 porting was probably a mistake. At Sun we had a pejorative for a lot of the garbage in SVR4: "it came from New Jersey".)

[TMWNN]

> Maybe. Sun could have acquired Commodore in 1984 or 1985 and Dave Miner and the blitter/copper, and gone a bit more the SGI route.

You mean acquire Amiga. Commodore in 1984 was far larger than the brand new Sun. But yes, that is a very intriguing path not taken.

>(I think the SVR4 porting was probably a mistake. At Sun we had a pejorative for a lot of the garbage in SVR4: "it came from New Jersey".)

You obviously are on the West Coast side of the Berkeley/Bell Labs divide. Was there a lot of internal discussion/dissension before/during the SunOS/Solaris transition?

[TMWNN]

> Maybe. Sun could have acquired Commodore in 1984 or 1985 and Dave Miner and the blitter/copper, and gone a bit more the SGI route.

Another path not taken is the Commodore 900 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_900> running Coherent. If Sun buys Amiga, perhaps Commodore goes ahead with it and eventually dominates the world via Unix(like)!

[cryptonector]

Sun selling Amgias would have been quite interesting.

As for AD, Sun had an opportunity to buy u/lukeh's XAD, which was compatible, and it could have done the whole embrace-and-extend thing to MSFT. Instead Sun passed on the deal, Novell bought it instead, and then MSFT acquired Novell. At the time the Sun DS folks were not particularly interested in taking on AD -- they had a cash cow and they were milking it, so no need for innovation.

As for Google using Linux or Solaris, it certainly would have been a PR boost for Sun, and one way or another would have improved Sun's position while denying Linux important resources (contributions from googlers).

Anyways, these things didn't happen.

[dboreham]

They didn't lose to NT. The loss in the consumer desktop market occurred in the DOS era.

[rbanffy]

NT ate the technical workstation space from below. Once NT was good enough on commodity hardware, they were toast.

Unless they went the Apple route and made “luxury workstations” average people would buy. Hindsight is always 20-20, so we now see all the things they could have done then to prevent now from happening.