Comment by bcantrill

I don't indulge in the SUNW autopsy parlor game often, but coincidentally, I've already played it twice today (for the first time in many months), and I'm waiting on a build -- so perhaps the third time's a charm...

Disclaimer: I was one of the ones who tried like hell to right the ship. So I am not only suffering from the same hindsight bias that everyone else will inevitably suffer from, I am further biased by the lens of my own actions and experience.

That said, I think Sun's problem was pretty simple: we thought we were a hardware company long after it should have been clear that we were a systems company. As a result, we made overpriced, underperforming (and, it kills me to say, unreliable) hardware. And because we were hardware-fixated, we did not understand the economic disruptive force of either Intel or open source until it was too late. (Believe me that some of us understood this: I worked extensively on both Solaris x86 and with the SPARC microprocessor teams -- and I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.)

Now to be honest, I (and others on the software side) played a role in enabling bad hardware behavior: we spent too much time trying to help save microprocessor management from an unmitigated disaster of their own creation (UltraSPARC-III, cruelly code named "Cheetah") when we should have been more forcefully advocating cutting them off. Personally, I feel I only started to really help the company turnaround when I refused to continue to enable it: I (and we, really) stopped trying to save the hardware teams from themselves, and focussed on delivering innovative systems software. And indeed, the software that resulted from that focus bought the company time and (I believed) an opportunity for renaissance: when coupled with the return of Andy and the open sourcing of Solaris, there was reason for great optimism around 2005 or so...

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough. One could argue that our technological pivots were too late, and they may well have been, but I think that the urgency and focus that we felt in the engine room (aided by the bone-cold water that was at our knees and rising) was simply not felt or appreciated in the wheelhouse: I feel that we could have made it had there been more interest at the top of Sun in the mechanics of running and managing a multi-billion dollar business...

Or maybe it's not so unfortunate: thanks to the fact that we open sourced the system, I still get to work everyday on the technology that I devoted my career to -- and I'm loving it more than ever, and having more fun developing it than I have in a long, long time. (And, it must be said, I'm working with many of the same engineers that made working at Sun great.)

So when I look back on those years, I believe it will ultimately be with fondness, not regret; for me personally, Scott nailed it: "Kicked Butt, Had Fun, Didn’t Cheat, Loved Our Customers, Changed Computing Forever."