Comment by cryptonector
7 hours ago
That's when I went to work for them. As far as forming my career went, it was a great move. And since it was Solaris engineering I went to, it was quite fun. But yeah, Sun was done -- it just didn't know it, and it spent almost a decade making mistake after mistake. I do think Sun could have been much more successful if senior management had made better decisions, in particular if they'd committed to x86_64 as the future.
Thanks for sharing. What do you think was the reason that the hardware part of Sun failed to keep up with competitors? Specifically why UltraSparc failed to match Pentium?
CPU design is expensive. Intel was ahead of the competition and wasn't fabbing, so Sun was a generation behind. That sort of thing.
Note that today things are quite different, and Apple can do what Sun wanted to do, but do it well. Market conditions are very different, and Apple, of course is the 800lb gorilla that Sun couldn't quite get to be. It's kinda funny: Apple and Sun weren't all that different, and Sun then and Apple now even more so. Apple just wasn't into servers, and Sun just wasn't into consumer hardware, but both wanted to vertically integrate hardware and software. Apple has a walled garden, Sun didn't. I do think these differences are relevant to why Sun failed, but the leadership differences count for a lot too: no one would compare Steve Jobs to Jonathan Schwartz, nor even to Scott McNealy -- it's just night and day. Now the differences in what Sun and Apple sought to do also evince differences in leadership.