Comment by cryptonector
3 hours ago
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!
> - 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.
UltraSPARC came out in 1995, and Athlon 64 in 2003. I'm confused on how it could be late?
> - 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. [..]
I disagree with this assessment strongly. I believe Oracle wanted Java and only Java. All other Sun properties were collateral damage of the acquisition. It might be weird that Oracle now owns MySQL, but Oracle never cared about it. (Of course, both your and my assessment are mere opinions.)
> UltraSPARC came out in 1995, and Athlon 64 in 2003. I'm confused on how it could be late?
Ah, sorry, I was referring to the CMT architecture.
It's a good list, and it's supported by the anecdotal evidence from my own career: my first dev job after college was on Solaris, but that company moved away from Sun because of Sun DS.
Why do you think ZFS on MacOS would have helped in any significant way? AFAIK, and I may be wrong, but Apple doesn't have a history relying on OEMs for their software, especially something as critical as operating systems. Am I wrong? Was it different back then?
> Why do you think ZFS on MacOS would have helped in any significant way?
It would have bought Sun mind-share. In that time frame Sun was trying really hard to re-acquire mind-share it had lost to Linux due to the non-deal with Google, the brief cancellation of Solaris x86, etc. OpenSolaris was an attempt to rebuild mind-share. Was rebuilding mind-share enough? No, no way, but it was a start.
It could have led to Apple acquiring Sun, say.
> AFAIK, and I may be wrong, but Apple doesn't have a history relying on OEMs for their software, especially something as critical as operating systems. Am I wrong? Was it different back then?
Apple did the work of integrating ZFS into OS X. They believed in it. Steve Jobs wanted indemnification in light of the NetApp lawsuit. Jonathan wouldn't agree to it. Giving it could have been a betting-the-company event, but Sun needed that sort of thing.