I interned for Sun and then worked as an MTS in Sun Labs for a couple of years. I miss Sun; I think they were very much an engineer's company that was spoiled by two things: big success in the early workstation market, and the dumb luck of the dot com boom. Sun hardware was solid (even though they fell behind the curve because of mismanagement of a couple of CPU lines), and its kernel (Solaris) was one of the well-engineered kernels ever. While any business makes some bad business decisions from time to time, one thing that was fatal was a crippling enterprise focus that failed to understand the huge growth opportunity that OSS and Linux represented. It was growth in a direction they not only didn't understand, but refused to understand, study, or adapt to.
Sun's heyday was in the boom. The fish were jumping in the boat. So naturally they were building bigger and bigger boats.
There was always the one-off ideas that might have gone here or there, but that core server cow just seemed like an endless source of cash. Thus they neglected the workstation market and ironically, the market for anything bigger than one single server rack. They didn't understand horizontal scaling, and the rise of cheap-but-replaceable consumer hardware like how Google did things was alien to them. They poo-poo'ed Linux, they killed and then unkilled Solaris x86, and a number of other things.
I do miss Sun though. As far as engineering goes, they were a very serious company full of serious engineers. Basically the polar opposite of 10X tech bros and startup culture.
Oof, the killing and subsequent unkilling of Solaris x86 in 2002 brings back very bad memories -- Sun management at its worst. It also highlighted the relative power of Sun's engineering in that everyone in Solaris knew it was the wrong decision, and we more or less disobeyed orders: during that period (January 2002 to August 2002, when it was reversed), we didn't change our treatment of x86. (And in particular, breaking x86 was grounds for a putback to be backed out.)
When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.
Agreed. When I was in the labs (2007 - 2010), my workstation was an AMD with Solaris on it, with a modern window manager and all, with IntelliJ and a great development environment. I almost didn't know it was Linux. But by then the ship had long sailed.
titzer · · focus · HN ↗
Sun's heyday was in the boom. The fish were jumping in the boat. So naturally they were building bigger and bigger boats.
There was always the one-off ideas that might have gone here or there, but that core server cow just seemed like an endless source of cash. Thus they neglected the workstation market and ironically, the market for anything bigger than one single server rack. They didn't understand horizontal scaling, and the rise of cheap-but-replaceable consumer hardware like how Google did things was alien to them. They poo-poo'ed Linux, they killed and then unkilled Solaris x86, and a number of other things.
I do miss Sun though. As far as engineering goes, they were a very serious company full of serious engineers. Basically the polar opposite of 10X tech bros and startup culture.
bcantrill · · focus · HN ↗
When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.
titzer · · focus · HN ↗