What Sun got wrong

You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200.

IIRC they won business awards for this.

Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?

This is precisely the role of the sales person for something like a service, but for a physical product it is pretty egregious. There is no greater sin than leaving money on the table. There's an old story about someone offering a quote that was apparently pretty low based on reaction, so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher.

This is how license compliance shakedowns work. Make sure your DRM is more flexible than theicensing terms, find an overage and see what you can get the customer to agree to.

I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.

I think this would be expected from a company that has acquired and absorbed EMC and Perot.

You can even run most cool Python, Go, Java, Rust, PHP among others, on systems like z/OS.

I was kinda stunned; there’s a level of balls involved in selling an x millions machine and having it fail closed that I’m sort of impressed by but also utterly appalled they’d treat their big customers like that..

I mean surely to fuck it could have been an automated reminder email to the mothership and not just: sorry folks no banking for you today.

The rise of the Internet made channel sales handoffs a weak point in the business model. I bet this missed sale went to a reseller who didn't respond and Sun didn't have any controls or visibility on that failure.

1999 and 2002 correspond roughly to telecom and dotcom bubbles popping. So open source operating systems were also pulled up into these positions through a lot of work and by the early 2000s it was kind of obvious this was the way forward.

2008 financial crisis really knocked the high end (RISC/UNIX/Itanium) and started the long migration to renting vs owning. In hindsight it's remarkable how much money used to just be there in the economy of all this. But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.

Whereas Dell just gave us a flat 30% discount on list pricing, and were clear in advance about what level of annual spend would trigger an increase to 35%. We'd order online and our sales rep would phone a few hours later to confirm. Other than that, they'd initiate contact maybe once a year when Dell refreshed their server or storage product lines and would offer to either send some bumpf or arrange for some demo kit.

Dealing with them was so much less hassle all round, you never got covered in slime, and you never felt like they were on the verge of offering you bribes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#2010s%E2%80%93present

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture

Imagine every bank you know going through tech modernization and maybe 70% of those are now using Red Hat OpenShift.

They own Red Hat (OpenShift kubernetes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform) AND HashiCorp (Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Packer, Vault, etc.) now, on top of their previous mainframe, services gigs, global financing arm, and calling everything they sell "watson".

Ah, sorry, I was referring to the CMT architecture.

They, and the software that ran on it (Dataviews), and their customers (Westinghouse Software in my case) were all soon undone by the arrival of powerful commodity Wintel.

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.

Motif did have a reputation for being a total drag to develop with, though. It's based on Xt. So is Athena, so if you've ever written an Xaw app it's pretty similar.

Only if you never repurchased.

Or you could DCA out: have a standard policy that no single stock can be more that x% of your portfolio, and as any one gets above that limit you crystallize profits. It's no different than having a 60/40 portfolio and rebalancing your equities if they get >60%.

I lean more towards passive and (total) market index funds, and just riding the roller coaster, as anything else is fairly either impossible or too time consuming:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co...

Around 2000 we started getting some EDA software released on Linux. I remember getting some Linux kernel patches and recompiling the kernel to change the user / kernel split from 2GB / 2GB to 3.5GB user / 0.5GB kernel. But we still needed the 64-bit Suns for some jobs that needed over 4GB RAM. Itanium was really expensive and slow and then AMD released the 64-bit Opteron in 2003. We bought them immediately and never bought another Sun.

My high school in 1992 got a bunch of old Sun3 and first gen Sun4 systems. I absolutely loved them. My dream then was to have my own Sun workstation but they were way too expensive. My other dream was to go to college and then get a job at Sun. I heard about Linux in 1993 and got my Unix system at home. I did work on some Sun UltraSPARC III companion chipsets but Sun couldn't compete on the price to performance ratio with Linux/x86

Around the beginning of 2006, I had a laptop with a 64-bit AMD Turion CPU and I could run on it Cadence and Mentor tools for ASIC design and the simulations were much faster than on a big Sun multi-processor server. Later that year our team finally got some servers with AMD Opteron, which accelerated dramatically the work in comparison with the traditional Sun servers.

The article is here: https://www.silkstream.net/blog/2006/08/comparison-ultraspar...

> SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.

You seem to be focusing strictly on performance, but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86. With SPARC everything can be done on the CLI (serials consoles or SSH), with x86 quite often you're still clicking on "open KVM window" for so many things. And of course many/most vendors make you purchase an 'advanced license' to use the remote KVM functionality of the LOM system.

My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well.

Combined with Linux package managers being infinitely better, the GNU core utilities having so many more conveniences and options than the Solaris equivalents, I felt like Sun was this dinosaur that couldn’t die fast enough. I’ll still never understand why so many people praise Sun for its engineering culture when free software seemed so superior to me at the time.

My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.

Maybe in the 90s the standards were different. Maybe their tech was better. But by the time I ever used their software is was the butt of jokes.

Linux took over the world because any licensing model that requires a per CPU license simply can’t work in a massively scalable situation like server farms and cloud.

Linux won on the server side because they got just as right as Unix. The crappy UI (windows) was the one that didn't work with shell scripting, didn't work with ssh, etc.

Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability.

Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.

Then Intel came out with dual-core processors, which was the new hotness. So he wrote a followup page, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills".

At the time, I thought they were funny, and made reasonable arguments. But in retrospect, they were just trying to distract the customers from the fact that Intel was overtaking them.

That wasn't even true back then.

On the other hand I have heard of some success stories about using SunRays as RDP clients, which is actually supported configuration (you still need a Solaris box that manages the sunrays and translates RDP to ALP).

It lived on in the world of Windows Terminal Services and things like Citrix - maybe still does in some places.

Nobody knows how the future will be. There are lots of options. There are self hostable open models today - they are not as good, but some report they are good enough. Right now I don't have the hardware to try them (I could - if I'm willing to accept a small number of tokens per minute - useful means more tokens per second as I can get in an hour). However I expect in a few years I'll be able buy consumer hardware with good enough GPUs (or perhaps an AI chip???). Will anyone other than a few hobbyists buy them? time will tell.

The moat is Being Able To Do Things No One Else Can and as both hardware and software commoditise that moat disappears.

Open LLMs are already only a few months behind the frontier models and as soon as someone works out that accessible and cheap domain-specific custom training has the potential to be a gamechanger the Big Names will die.

Math puzzles only get you so far.

LLMs are in their Big Compute phase, and it's only a matter of time before that ends - because the intelligence of the frontier models isn't increasing fast enough and providing big enough benefits to make the models more valuable than cheaper, smaller competition.

i think llms will be the same.

n=1 but at $work they are forcing us off enterprise and on to personal claude max that caps at $200 and people are like “you don’t need the top end models anyways just use the cheaper one for coding”, which begs the question how long till those “good enough” models run locally (with relative ease) and our company can cut that huge monthly cost with just the macbook pro they are gonna buy anyways.

the best was having everyone with a disk cross-mount each other. any failure snowballed into a global failure.

What's interesting is that the other RISC outfit at the time, little old Acorn in the UK, did manage to adapt their proprietary chip business to the future of compute and now we all use many many ARM processors every day.

So clearly there was still a hardware route available, just again: a huge product/engineering shift.

But Illumos is a real modern viable option over Linux (and *racle Solaris) for server hardware.

True, but did you need that? These are all high-end (therefore low-volume) server stuff. I loved that, and their high-end systems with dozens of SPARCs, but I had one customer who had one, and everyone in my company knew they made a terrible decision - they needed a web server, and you could do more with a rack of Dell boxes for a fraction of the Ultra Enterprise [very large number] price tag. They also decided they should run an enterprise application server (they went with Dynamo) instead of Tomcat, so, again, they made a stack (maybe a directed acyclic graph) of bad decisions. I think I facepalmed so much that is the point my hair started falling.

Exactly. Oxide builds machines for the few companies that won't go with Azure or AWS, or that got so big Azure and AWS are no longer competitive (and it takes A LOT to be in that space, because pricing is ridiculously flexible). This is a niche market.

The question I always ask is "why would I deploy my software on your platform?". The answer is, most of the time, I wouldn't. I don't want to play platform bingo with company money.

They were always a hardware provider. If they could have offered credible desktops at PC prices, they could have made a serious dent in the low-end server (one step up from desktops), which is an essential stepping stone for securing midrange and above.

(perhaps it doesn't do your rather full blog post justice to compare it to something considerably less complete like a comment thread)

> Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome

I emphatically agree. Maybe it goes without saying but with Sun, multiple generations of leadership, I think.

ZFS was pretty unrivaled for long term storage for a long time. Solaris zones were containers before they were cool. Dtrace is pretty neat. Etc.

Maybe they could have survived with their OpenSolaris push driving low end adoption and high end customers buying their hardware. Pretty sure they would have had to migrate to x86, but they were dabling in that.

Maybe make some low end commodity x86 servers. Sell enterprise a fully engineered big ass database server and a bunch of commodity web servers. Doesn't have to be exceptionally priced, just good enough to let customers have single vendor server purchasing instead of getting the big stuff from sun and the little stuff from dell or hp.

More systems consulting? Sun had great engineers, but you don't see too many war stories about them fixing stuff for customers (maybe they keep quiet though).

But as some sibling comments indicate they already had a lot of the software infra for distributed computing the way it eventually came to be done today, with SOA/microservices, service discovery, or serverless lambdas etc. via frameworks like EJB or JXTA. They were admittedly pretty cumbersome, like the contemporary equivalents COM/DCOM, and made the fundamental mistake of trying to abstract away the fallacies of distributed computing, but also solved most of the common problems involved.

Potentially they could have pivoted to monetizing that software infra even if it got deployed on arbitrary hardware, which may have tided them over until they could spin up their own cloud service, even if it was a fast follow to AWS. However Sun seemed committed to making their expensive servers their primary business model and relegated the software to “loss leader” complements.

If they had just looked at how services were being developed on Linux + commodity servers, they’d have seen they already had offerings in that space that could be monetized.

Sun could've been the "Apple" of x86 Unix: it just works.

I saw the end coming for Sun when I had a dx2/66 at home running Linux in the late 90s. It was brilliant.

Open source Solaris as early as possible.

Really compete with MIPS, ARM, Motorola, etc. in the embedded space. Don't even try to make it a huge financial win, just get the SPARC architecture and dev tools out there with good Linux support.

Consistently support Solaris x86 and frequently release new generations of Intel and AMD workstation-class hardware.

Partner with TSMC for SPARC production a lot earlier.

Since we're just having fun here: acquire Nvidia in 1999, at which time it was pretty obvious workstation graphics was going to be commodified, and Sun could have bought them with their pocket change.

This is one of the top reasons I loved and love Sun. Truth, engineering, had power.

I've never experienced this in any company since Sun.

DHTs—Chord paper was 2001—started popping up. The big software vendors looked at the architectural (if not legal) success of Napster & the other P2P networks and were invested in finding legitimate applications. Open standards were seeing real adoption left and right.

But it didn’t happen. Maybe simultaneously too late in the Internet’s evolution and too early.

Too late because the big kids were involved. Especially Microsoft, who would never allow any standard they couldn’t EEE to emerge. Too early because the players like Google who later could muscle through core infrastructure standards weren’t there yet.

And now it’s likely too late, with mobile embedding a client-server model with the weight of 10B devices.

In the later, I don't have to worry about hardware/power/networking/etc at all.

Around 1998-2000 my dad made a little business out of setting up linux servers on commodity hardware in my hometown. Primitive social networks, LAN provider servers, mail servers all worked just fine. Not without some involved convincing, and tinkering, and kernel patching but they did work.

One or two of the companies later became regional champions, running 100s of linux/x86/dell machines.

None of them would be able to afford a proper Sun server. Sun would never bother itself with these original tiny contracts.

It dont think Sun even stood a chance in this game. They couldnt even realize this happening!

By the early 2000's, 1) Linux was solid, why bother with Solaris? 2) ebay and other channels were flooded with used Sun hardware from failed dot-com companies anyway. No need to buy new.