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by ghaff 237 days ago
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.
2 comments
shrubble 237 days ago
(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...

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panick21_ 225 days ago
- 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.

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johannes1234321 237 days ago
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.
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pjmlp 237 days ago
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.

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robobox 236 days ago
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.
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