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.
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.