I've written several times here about all the mistakes that Sun made during the 00s that doomed it. Among the many mistakes it made are:
- Cancelling -if briefly- Solaris on x86 in 2002. This killed Solaris in the minds of many who didn't want to be locked into Sun for SPARC.
- Failing to make a deal with Google in 2002. Apparently Sun insisted on knowing how many servers Google had, something that Google considered a high-value secret, so Sun failed to make a deal with Google, so Google ended up using Linux and contributing to Linux. This was a tremendous mind-share disaster -- it's hard to overestimate the damage done by this.
- Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.
- Not giving up on J2ME earlier -- it's not the sort of thing that could last forever, and Steve Jobs killed it with the iPhone. This was a case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making.
- Failure to recognize that Sun needed to become a systems company, not a CPU company.
- Failure to respond to Active Directory. This was yet another case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making: the Sun DS product team was milking their existing customers more than they wanted to go after more business with a sustainable strategy.
- UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison.
- Failure to make a deal with Apple for it to use ZFS in OS X.
- The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle. But of course, it turns out that Oracle -a company built on building mind-share- had become too blinded by vendor lock-in just like Sun, so...
There were numerous other mistakes along the way. These are the most salient, for me anyway.
What's shocking is how long it took Sun to fail under those circumstances!
Also shocking is how much amazing stuff came out of Solaris engineering and the systems division!
> - Cancelling -if briefly- Solaris on x86 in 2002. This killed Solaris in the minds of many who didn't want to be locked into Sun for SPARC.
There is an interesting interview with they guy responsible. He basically even said it was a mistake and he knew it, and he internally signaled 'don't worry its just temporary' but there was a cooperate need to signal support for SPARC. Seemed to be internally political.
I think he didn't realize how externally this would look for the viability of Solaris on x86.
> - Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.
Can you give some context. I am interested in Sun history and I don't know that one.
> - UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison.
What do you mean, UltraSPARC was in 1995. A decade earlier was pre commercial RISC.
(Edit: I see you mean Sparc T1, but those chips were trash, they were not to late. They were good marketing above good product)
UltraSPARC was one of the few actually successful developments. Unlike pretty much every other CPU project at Sun starting in the 90s.
> - The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid.
> There is an interesting interview with they guy responsible. He basically even said it was a mistake and he knew it, and he internally signaled 'don't worry its just temporary' but there was a cooperate need to signal support for SPARC. Seemed to be internally political.
> I think he didn't realize how externally this would look for the viability of Solaris on x86.
I'd love to see that. Yeah, it didn't go well. It was a disaster.
> > - Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.
> Can you give some context. I am interested in Sun history and I don't know that one.
In 2004 Sun closed Sun PS. Well, it... didn't go away completely in that what was left became Sun Client Solutions, but the lay-offs IIRC hurt that unit a great deal.
> (Edit: I see you mean Sparc T1, but those chips were trash, they were not to late. They were good marketing above good product)
Yeah, and it was too late to edit my comment. My bad. But yes. The SPARC folks had some great ideas in the T line, but it was a) way too late, b) didn't have access to latest node size, so it wasn't going to be great-performing, c) performance sucked.
> Also StorageTek.
Eh, not sure about that. The acquisitions of StorageTek and Procom were the only ones I can think of where Sun actually managed to capitalize on what it acquired. The Procom side contributed a Microsoft RPC stack and an SMB/CIFS stack, which was in fact integrated into Solaris. The StorageTek side became the Sun storage appliance.
In 2009 Sun's greatest hope was that its systems work on the storage appliance was going to succeed and save it. That stack was far far better than NetApp's and anyone else's. Of course, that didn't materialize in time, and we know the rest of the story.
With all these mistakes there's enough there to think about many possible alternative paths Sun could have taken, but... there's no point, it's done. I don't recommend dwelling upon much unless you're building a business school case study, and for that I think Sun is an excellent case candidate, especially given that you can compare Sun to Apple and others, so you can see what could have been.
My diagnostic is that McNealy checked out with the 2001 crisis, Schwartz was just a really, really bad steward, and no one wanted to take the hatchet to the vendor lock-in products that were holding Sun back. In 2002 the right thing to have done was to announce less investment in SPARC and start winding it down -- that would have freed many billions for other things later in the 00s, and it would have saved Sun PS. But perhaps in 2002 Sun didn't have the systems expertise needed for the transformation it needed to undertake.
Meanwhile Apple was never wedded to an ISA for long, and even now that they make their own CPUs they could easily switch if they had to. I say 'easily', but it's monstrously expensive, yet for Apple it's totally doable. Steve Jobs wasn't afraid of disrupting Apple itself. That's what Sun needed: internal disruption.
I'm not totally convinced by the reasoning. Would love to hear some former Sun people give an opinion on his leadership and other perspective.
> Yeah, and it was too late to edit my comment. My bad. But yes. The SPARC folks had some great ideas in the T line, but it was a) way too late, b) didn't have access to latest node size, so it wasn't going to be great-performing, c) performance sucked.
Dropping performance a little bit for Multicore was reasonable for servers, and there were some good ideas there but in practice it was far to extreme to be practical.
StorageTek was quite expensive and sold mostly very large archiving solutions. Not sure that was really the right direction. Such a huge acquisition cost a lot, not just money.
But you are right that this was not totally unreasonable. Still its pretty aggressive move for the company in the position of Sun.
> Sun needed: internal disruption.
After the disaster that was Viking. They might have gone 32bit x86, 64bit Alpha. DEC was desprate for Alpha buyers and would have made them a good deal. But they double down on going all in on SPARC and UltraSPARC confirmed them in this being the right solution.
cryptonector · · focus · HN ↗
- Cancelling -if briefly- Solaris on x86 in 2002. This killed Solaris in the minds of many who didn't want to be locked into Sun for SPARC.
- Failing to make a deal with Google in 2002. Apparently Sun insisted on knowing how many servers Google had, something that Google considered a high-value secret, so Sun failed to make a deal with Google, so Google ended up using Linux and contributing to Linux. This was a tremendous mind-share disaster -- it's hard to overestimate the damage done by this.
- Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.
- Not giving up on J2ME earlier -- it's not the sort of thing that could last forever, and Steve Jobs killed it with the iPhone. This was a case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making.
- Failure to recognize that Sun needed to become a systems company, not a CPU company.
- Failure to respond to Active Directory. This was yet another case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making: the Sun DS product team was milking their existing customers more than they wanted to go after more business with a sustainable strategy.
- UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison.
- Failure to make a deal with Apple for it to use ZFS in OS X.
- The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle. But of course, it turns out that Oracle -a company built on building mind-share- had become too blinded by vendor lock-in just like Sun, so...
There were numerous other mistakes along the way. These are the most salient, for me anyway.
What's shocking is how long it took Sun to fail under those circumstances!
Also shocking is how much amazing stuff came out of Solaris engineering and the systems division!
panick21_ · · focus · HN ↗
There is an interesting interview with they guy responsible. He basically even said it was a mistake and he knew it, and he internally signaled 'don't worry its just temporary' but there was a cooperate need to signal support for SPARC. Seemed to be internally political.
I think he didn't realize how externally this would look for the viability of Solaris on x86.
> - Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.
Can you give some context. I am interested in Sun history and I don't know that one.
> - UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison.
What do you mean, UltraSPARC was in 1995. A decade earlier was pre commercial RISC.
(Edit: I see you mean Sparc T1, but those chips were trash, they were not to late. They were good marketing above good product)
UltraSPARC was one of the few actually successful developments. Unlike pretty much every other CPU project at Sun starting in the 90s.
> - The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid.
Also StorageTek.
cryptonector · · focus · HN ↗
> I think he didn't realize how externally this would look for the viability of Solaris on x86.
I'd love to see that. Yeah, it didn't go well. It was a disaster.
> > - Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.
> Can you give some context. I am interested in Sun history and I don't know that one.
In 2004 Sun closed Sun PS. Well, it... didn't go away completely in that what was left became Sun Client Solutions, but the lay-offs IIRC hurt that unit a great deal.
> (Edit: I see you mean Sparc T1, but those chips were trash, they were not to late. They were good marketing above good product)
Yeah, and it was too late to edit my comment. My bad. But yes. The SPARC folks had some great ideas in the T line, but it was a) way too late, b) didn't have access to latest node size, so it wasn't going to be great-performing, c) performance sucked.
> Also StorageTek.
Eh, not sure about that. The acquisitions of StorageTek and Procom were the only ones I can think of where Sun actually managed to capitalize on what it acquired. The Procom side contributed a Microsoft RPC stack and an SMB/CIFS stack, which was in fact integrated into Solaris. The StorageTek side became the Sun storage appliance.
In 2009 Sun's greatest hope was that its systems work on the storage appliance was going to succeed and save it. That stack was far far better than NetApp's and anyone else's. Of course, that didn't materialize in time, and we know the rest of the story.
With all these mistakes there's enough there to think about many possible alternative paths Sun could have taken, but... there's no point, it's done. I don't recommend dwelling upon much unless you're building a business school case study, and for that I think Sun is an excellent case candidate, especially given that you can compare Sun to Apple and others, so you can see what could have been.
My diagnostic is that McNealy checked out with the 2001 crisis, Schwartz was just a really, really bad steward, and no one wanted to take the hatchet to the vendor lock-in products that were holding Sun back. In 2002 the right thing to have done was to announce less investment in SPARC and start winding it down -- that would have freed many billions for other things later in the 00s, and it would have saved Sun PS. But perhaps in 2002 Sun didn't have the systems expertise needed for the transformation it needed to undertake.
Meanwhile Apple was never wedded to an ISA for long, and even now that they make their own CPUs they could easily switch if they had to. I say 'easily', but it's monstrously expensive, yet for Apple it's totally doable. Steve Jobs wasn't afraid of disrupting Apple itself. That's what Sun needed: internal disruption.
panick21_ · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vDunup8v5M&t=2940s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vDunup8v5M&t=2940s
I'm not totally convinced by the reasoning. Would love to hear some former Sun people give an opinion on his leadership and other perspective.
> Yeah, and it was too late to edit my comment. My bad. But yes. The SPARC folks had some great ideas in the T line, but it was a) way too late, b) didn't have access to latest node size, so it wasn't going to be great-performing, c) performance sucked.
Dropping performance a little bit for Multicore was reasonable for servers, and there were some good ideas there but in practice it was far to extreme to be practical.
StorageTek was quite expensive and sold mostly very large archiving solutions. Not sure that was really the right direction. Such a huge acquisition cost a lot, not just money.
But you are right that this was not totally unreasonable. Still its pretty aggressive move for the company in the position of Sun.
> Sun needed: internal disruption.
After the disaster that was Viking. They might have gone 32bit x86, 64bit Alpha. DEC was desprate for Alpha buyers and would have made them a good deal. But they double down on going all in on SPARC and UltraSPARC confirmed them in this being the right solution.
cryptonector · · focus · HN ↗