[cdf]

Even though I worked for companies that killed Sun, I never stopped admiring the foundational work the company was doing, which was not just cool, but critical for technological progress, and was very sad when the company sold out to Oracle and was gutted alive. HPC stuff Sun pioneered is still very relevant today. In an alternate timeline, Sun fully embraced Open Source and became a key pillar of the internet today.

Unfortunately, while we are well aware of cool tech companies that were ran aground by the finance/sales/management consulting types, Sun felt like a company ran aground by engineers.

Zuck famously kept the Sun logo up for quite a while when Facebook bought Sun's HQ campus, as a warning to the employees of what they could become. In some ways, Facebook/Meta is the spiritual successor of Sun, just like Google became the spiritual successor of SGI when they bought the SGI campus.

But these two ad driven companies never quite became the new Sun/SGI, for better and worse.

[bcantrill]

I don't disagree that Sun was a company run aground by engineers -- though I certainly like to think of myself as one of the engineers trying to navigate us around the rocky shoals! For whatever it's worth, I broadly stand by my analysis on HN fourteen years ago (!!) of Sun's demise[0] -- which now also stands as clear foreshadowing for Oxide eight years before its founding.[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033

[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...

[hylaride]

There's a world where Sun did what you hoped (became a systems company) and created Joyent in-house. However, hyper-scaling means going fast and cheap before good comes along. Sun's habit was fast and good and that's an extremely difficult hurdle to overcome culturally. (By fast I mean growing a platform, not raw performance, FWIW).

Solaris 10/11, with all its technologies (zfs, zones, crossbow, dtrace, etc), was the pinnacle of UNIX that came out just when the world changed. At a company I worked at circa 2008-12 (that was a solaris shop) we essentially created a proto-docker with containers and ZFS that allowed rapid deployments and (re)building of our systems. It was a game changer for on-prem.

[ghaff]

Bryan,

I'm not sure what Sun could realistically have done to come out the other side of the dot-com carnage. Other companies in roughly equivalent situations come to mind. You start looking at doing a hard reboot when the margins for that reboot aren't there and it's difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe an earlier reinvention involving more open source and alignment with where hardware was headed. Don't know.

[shrubble]

(not Bryan)

Sun did waste a lot of money in buying MySQL, $800 million in cash and $200 million in stock. Certainly a distraction, as well.

Sun never offered any way to inexpensively get onto the on-ramp of Sun hardware and software as they thought they could continue selling high-margin hardware forever; they had their $995 V100 which even included their much-loved LOM which was a remote-management device like iLO/DRAC/IPMI , then followed it up with: nothing.

info about the V100: https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_sysh...

[panick21_]

- Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) — $4.1B

- MySQL AB — $1.0B

- SeeBeyond Technology — $387M

Some more companies undisclosed and of course in 2000 Cobalt Networks for $2.0B.

But in general, just hanging around on SPARC far to long. Unfortunately the person put in charger of SPARC told Scott that he thought SPARC could be saved but it would need 4-5 years. And that's when they went into mulit-core, selling everybody on the whole 'threw-put computing' nonsense.

[johannes1234321]

Well, in stock market terms the MySQL deal paid for itself. It pushed the stock well up. However turning this in real money wasn't possible in the year they had till IBM and Oracle did their bidding.

[pjmlp]

That Solaris/Toshiba laptops deal was interesting, but if I recall correctly the price was a bit too much, and maybe it could have been considerd yet another distraction.

I surely would have liked to get one of those laptops, though.

[robobox]

I think the easiest thing would've been to basically ignore dotcom and thus only take a hit from the general financial downturn and not from basing your company around the stock bubble (tortoise vs hare type of deal) , but Platt is the only example I know of and he got kicked out of HP for doing that.

[kaladin-jasnah]

Honestly, it's because of what Sun's innovations in systems software that I look so fondly on their work.

I do ask myself after reading the HN comment you linked, how often is the limiting factor of systems software the hardware? Potentially a case of this with consumer hardware is ACPI issues, like [1] and [2]. You could design the best software, but if your underlying firmware or hardware is faulty, then you would have to design your software around the faults instead of improving the lower layers or accept bugs.

Oxide describes on their website issues with "vendors pointing fingers with no real accountability, even when teams need it most," and I have seen this point discussed online in regards to Oxide's work on designing their own hardware and firmware. Incidentally, I applied to Oxide recently; I think they're cool for the reasons I thought Sun was cool.

[1] https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...

[2] https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive

[chris_wot]

“ Believe me that some of us understood this: I worked extensively on both Solaris x86 and with the SPARC microprocessor teams -- and I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.”

Was that before or after you realised the Linux kernel devs were better at squeezing performance efficiencies out of x86 than you guys were?

[chris_wot]

Awww.. a little hurt?

[AlexeyBelov]

Why are you hurt? And why does it lead to comments such as above? I think you need to figure that out, because it wasn't a good wholesome comment by any measure.

[chris_wot]

I'm not. But there was a technical discussion made where the kernel devs at the time explained why they were beating the pants off Sun, and Cantrill replied with "have you kissed a girl".

That's the sort of behaviour I'd sack the guy for if he worked for me.

[bcantrill]

Oh brother, this again. To bystanders wondering what the hell this is about, it's actually about two things, the most recent of which was over a decade ago.

The first thing is a regrettable quip of mine on Usenet (RIP) from October 29, 1996 -- just over 29 years ago (!!) as of this writing. As I have made clear several (many?) times over the years, I do very much regret it: I was young and it was stupid.[0]

But that's also not what this is REALLY about, because that decades-old quip on Usenet had itself been forgotten for over a decade when it was dug up in 2013 by people who newly discovered that they hated my guts. And they discovered they hated my guts because they vehemently disagreed with my handling of the the Noordhuis pronoun incident.[1] And on this, I have no regrets -- and will have no regrets.

Hopefully that clears up where the (seemingly limitless) venom is coming from -- with my apologies for dragging confused bystanders into decades-old internet beef!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041086

[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2013/11/30/the-power-of-a-prono...