As much as this resonates with me it smacks a bit too much of an Engineering vs Sales fight. Engineering blaming Sales for not selling, and Sales... where is the voice of Sales? By 2005 Sun's margins on hardware sales had to be under vicious attack from Dell and all the old incumbents. Google and Amazon were ushering in the era of commodified compute and soon offering it on demand on the cloud. Proprietary hardware platforms were under the most vigorous multi-front assault since the inception of computing.
Meanwhile I have to imagine Sun, like IBM and everyone else at the time, was noticing what incredible margins you get from software services. No factories or fabs. No supply chain logistics. Sun's proprietary hardware business should have been dying (or at least radically shifting: a product/engineering problem, not a sales one) by all market indications of the time.
So if I was a sales person and got a call from a startup for a colo's worth of machines... I probably don't have much incentive to pick up. The startup will probably fail, as most do, so the opportunity to build a relationship and sell higher margin services is probably nil. Startups hate paying for that stuff anyway.
I have incredible respect for Bryan Cantrill. He obviously knows far more about this situation and business than I do, so he's almost definitely more correct than I am...
However I would ask readers to at least be curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?" Or was it a rational choice and much deeper problems with Sun's business model were the cause of their demise?
I feel like Sun's main problem was that that era was pretty much the steepest part of the Intel S curve as far as chip performance goes, and it was outpacing the older chips on fab progress alone. I'm pretty sure had something like TSMC been around then at current strength, and Sun fabbed their excellent designs there, we'd have a mirror of what Apple is doing but in server space.
Suns designs were not excellent. In fact their history with CPU making is pretty damn terrible. The made the wrong choice almost the whole time.
They got it right initially, making Solaris with gate-array and that was a big success. Small company got RISC chip out fast and it beat what was out-there.
Then they went all in on CMOS-Bipolar chip, that was massively late, massively expensive. The completely lost the plot and were not competitive in the early 90s. Thankfully they had the software buy in from costumers, and did some good stuff otherwise (they also did the disastrous Solaris transition) but they overcame all that.
Then they did a bit better with UltraSPARC in 1995, they were still not top of the line, getting easily crushed by Alpha and others. But it was 64 bit and that helped them long term. Nowhere near 'excellent' for the time period. More like, good enough. Then they rolled on from there, but were never anywhere close to Alpha and others until around 2000.
They made all the mistakes you can make in the 90s, going heavy into Gallium Arsenide that was a disaster. Then they went heavy on VLIW technology in another disaster.
Then they completely lost the plot in the early 2000s, and eventually pretty much gave up completely and switched to marketing T1 chips and 'threw-put computing' because they couldn't produce competitive chips on single thread performance.
In fact they did switch from Texas Instruments to TSMC in that time period. You can read about that in 'Life Under the Sun: My 20-Year Journey at Sun Microsystems'. Don't take everything in that book at face value, its very much putting a positive spin on things, but it tells some of those stories.
I don't know what Sun's strategy was in the 2000s, but doing all of the R&D to develop exotic new hardware and then focusing the sales force on software seems like they're getting the worst of both worlds.
Sure, I'm not saying that IBM's switch to services is some brilliant panacea for all proprietary hardware makers, just citing it as one of the market changes at the time that Sun seemed unprepared for.
What's interesting is that the other RISC outfit at the time, little old Acorn in the UK, did manage to adapt their proprietary chip business to the future of compute and now we all use many many ARM processors every day.
So clearly there was still a hardware route available, just again: a huge product/engineering shift.
It didn't hurt that ARM was spun out entirely. The computer side of Acorn was wound up in 1998/9, and then the remnant of that went onto DSL boxes, exiting by getting picked up by Broadcom for £366 million.
Well, definitely read Jason's blog entry that I linked to[0], which gets into the structural problems. To be clear, there were some extraordinary sales folks at Sun (as was said to me when I first came to Sun: "Remember that our sales folks are so good that they sold Solaris 2.3 on Viking!"), and I always personally got along very well with them. I was happy to be put in front of customers, and they were happy to use me -- and some of my fondest memories were with sales folks in some of the geographies which were particularly strong (shout out to Sun Canada, Sun Australia, and to the Wall Street and Itasca offices in the US).
So this isn't about the people at all (they will express the same frustration!) but about leadership that wasn't interested in running a business. I do want to stop short of overly personalizing it, but the simple truth is: Scott visited customers where they lived -- and Jonathan more or less didn't.
Ah, I love this framing of "visiting customers where they live." Definitely gets the bad taste of an eng-v-sales spat out of my mouth. Thanks for the details!
> I probably don't have much incentive to pick up.
This is what Dell got right - for their sales team, this was an easy process - the product line was simple and easy to customise. Their sales reps wouldn't spend much time creating the proposals and could spend the remaining time building relationships with a lot more customers, some of which wouldn't fail.
> curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?"
Unless you create incentives for bringing new customers, they'll leave the new names for last.
schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
Meanwhile I have to imagine Sun, like IBM and everyone else at the time, was noticing what incredible margins you get from software services. No factories or fabs. No supply chain logistics. Sun's proprietary hardware business should have been dying (or at least radically shifting: a product/engineering problem, not a sales one) by all market indications of the time.
So if I was a sales person and got a call from a startup for a colo's worth of machines... I probably don't have much incentive to pick up. The startup will probably fail, as most do, so the opportunity to build a relationship and sell higher margin services is probably nil. Startups hate paying for that stuff anyway.
I have incredible respect for Bryan Cantrill. He obviously knows far more about this situation and business than I do, so he's almost definitely more correct than I am...
However I would ask readers to at least be curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?" Or was it a rational choice and much deeper problems with Sun's business model were the cause of their demise?
foobarian · · focus · HN ↗
panick21_ · · focus · HN ↗
They got it right initially, making Solaris with gate-array and that was a big success. Small company got RISC chip out fast and it beat what was out-there.
Then they went all in on CMOS-Bipolar chip, that was massively late, massively expensive. The completely lost the plot and were not competitive in the early 90s. Thankfully they had the software buy in from costumers, and did some good stuff otherwise (they also did the disastrous Solaris transition) but they overcame all that.
Then they did a bit better with UltraSPARC in 1995, they were still not top of the line, getting easily crushed by Alpha and others. But it was 64 bit and that helped them long term. Nowhere near 'excellent' for the time period. More like, good enough. Then they rolled on from there, but were never anywhere close to Alpha and others until around 2000.
They made all the mistakes you can make in the 90s, going heavy into Gallium Arsenide that was a disaster. Then they went heavy on VLIW technology in another disaster.
Then they completely lost the plot in the early 2000s, and eventually pretty much gave up completely and switched to marketing T1 chips and 'threw-put computing' because they couldn't produce competitive chips on single thread performance.
In fact they did switch from Texas Instruments to TSMC in that time period. You can read about that in 'Life Under the Sun: My 20-Year Journey at Sun Microsystems'. Don't take everything in that book at face value, its very much putting a positive spin on things, but it tells some of those stories.
Centigonal · · focus · HN ↗
schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
What's interesting is that the other RISC outfit at the time, little old Acorn in the UK, did manage to adapt their proprietary chip business to the future of compute and now we all use many many ARM processors every day.
So clearly there was still a hardware route available, just again: a huge product/engineering shift.
happycube · · focus · HN ↗
bcantrill · · focus · HN ↗
So this isn't about the people at all (they will express the same frustration!) but about leadership that wasn't interested in running a business. I do want to stop short of overly personalizing it, but the simple truth is: Scott visited customers where they lived -- and Jonathan more or less didn't.
[0] <a href="https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-me/" rel="nofollow">https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...
schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
rbanffy · · focus · HN ↗
This is what Dell got right - for their sales team, this was an easy process - the product line was simple and easy to customise. Their sales reps wouldn't spend much time creating the proposals and could spend the remaining time building relationships with a lot more customers, some of which wouldn't fail.
> curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?"
Unless you create incentives for bringing new customers, they'll leave the new names for last.