What Sun got wrong

As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.

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!

I sold my Sun stock at the internet bubble top for $70 a share. A few months later it was $7. I think of that when I see PE ratios in the hundreds for Tesla, SpaceX and other AI stocks.

Since we're sharing, I have fond memories of my using my the Sun thin clients at university. They were slow to start up and use for the most part, but once you got to the terminal... it was great.

Being a hacker-type, I did everything with it.

Email? Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine.

Want some html on my personal page? Use vi.

I think they didn't take away my access for years after college, and I would sometimes login and poke around just for fun.

I do blame them, along with the rise of Java and the awful gui toolkit motif for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I was so frustrated that our grades were dependent on learning something that I saw as completely worthless in light of the dotcom boom happening at the time. I wanted them to teach us web technologies, or at least some good system code, but all I got was broken x11 and awful performance.

> Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.

I would contend that Sun was never interested in running a business. They always cared more about building amazing technology and suffered the sales to make money.

You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them).

Edit: I had on rose colored glasses. I was thinking of late 90s SUN. They did in fact start getting crushed in the early 2000s.

I think the most important thing Sun got wrong was having no credible onboarding path for new clients. Why would someone invest in SPARC and Solaris when a generic x86 with Linux would do 99% of what the SPARC box would do, for far less? Why would someone who is developing their software on an x86 box with Linux care about deploying it to SPARC+Solaris? Or SPARC+Linux? Or x86+Solaris? There is a huge advantage in deploying to the same platform you develop for, which means, not having a credible desktop will hurt you in the long run.

The same applies to IBM's POWER and Z - how many green field projects are being built for them? Apart from weirdos (such as myself) who is even interested in that? And even then, I will not suggest building anything new on AIX or z/OS, or Linux on either, unless there is a really compelling (such as "we got the hardware for free", or "we really need instruction-cycle latencies to run inference and we can't match that with any other NPU") reason.

Don't get me wrong - I love using uncommon hardware with uncommon OSs (which expose bugs that are affected by endianness, or Linuxisms, or blindly assuming a string is ASCII, or that a file stays put while you use it).

As much as this resonates with me it smacks a bit too much of an Engineering vs Sales fight. Engineering blaming Sales for not selling, and Sales... where is the voice of Sales? By 2005 Sun's margins on hardware sales had to be under vicious attack from Dell and all the old incumbents. Google and Amazon were ushering in the era of commodified compute and soon offering it on demand on the cloud. Proprietary hardware platforms were under the most vigorous multi-front assault since the inception of computing.

Meanwhile I have to imagine Sun, like IBM and everyone else at the time, was noticing what incredible margins you get from software services. No factories or fabs. No supply chain logistics. Sun's proprietary hardware business should have been dying (or at least radically shifting: a product/engineering problem, not a sales one) by all market indications of the time.

So if I was a sales person and got a call from a startup for a colo's worth of machines... I probably don't have much incentive to pick up. The startup will probably fail, as most do, so the opportunity to build a relationship and sell higher margin services is probably nil. Startups hate paying for that stuff anyway.

I have incredible respect for Bryan Cantrill. He obviously knows far more about this situation and business than I do, so he's almost definitely more correct than I am...

However I would ask readers to at least be curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?" Or was it a rational choice and much deeper problems with Sun's business model were the cause of their demise?

Making workstations even in the dominant market position that Sun had, was a cottage industry compared to technology today, and it was managed that way. I wouldn't blame management for Sun being irrelevant now.

What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. Not even Xerox. I've used aa Xerox Alto, a Sun workstation, an LMI CADR, and a Symbolics 3600, and none of them were as carefully crafted as a Macintosh with a tiny memory and a floppy disk. Next inherited this ethic.

Jobs valued the person using the machine more than anything else about the machine.

Buying from Sun may have devolved into a direct-touch upsell disaster. Esp. compared to Dell which at one point was almost unique in having a working, easy-to-use web product configurator. Dell really nailed "getting products ordered and to the customer is part of the value equation"—a supply chain virtue no one else was really optimizing 1990–2005.

But selling to Sun Microsystems as a vendor was a joy. It paid bills like clockwork (net 35 IIRC). Completely showed up all the multi-$B IT competitors. They preached hyper-efficiency, but Sun delivered it in its own dealings. Unfortunately after the dot-com downfall Sun extended days payments outstanding (DPO) just like everyone else.

Back in the early 90s, I ran several procurements for university computer labs. We were under severe budget constraints, and, as a computer science department, we had constraints not normally found in such labs (for example, we needed to use certain compilers, so they had to support the workstation architectures). We wrote RFPs in accordance with university policies, and, while a number of potential bidders couldn't meet them, the companies in question all understood the constraints, and unsuccessful bidders were constructive, on the grounds of “consider us next time, ok?” All of them were like this, except one. The only time I have ever had someone threaten my job was the Sun Microsystems sales rep, after they lost a competition.

The Sun model of beefy server, ultra-thin client worked incredibly well and presaged the widespread adoption of virtualisation that eventually led to cloud computing and containerised software. Unfortunately that model made it very easy to undercut their prices using commodity hardware; I managed a Solaris/Sun Ray network c.2004 and it was cheaper to switch to Linux/Intel and buy spare hardware to keep in a cupboard “just in case” than to keep the Sun network going through its support contract.

I worked on enterprise software around the turn of the century. There was no database/os combo more bullet proof than Oracle on Solaris. Solaris was a great OS but the speed and ferocity that Linux killed Sun was something I will never forget.

I went to the Menlo Park offices to see a demo of their 64-cpu (I think) system at the time but it didn’t take long for Linux on intel killed the entire market.

I was once SUN Microsystems Campus Ambassador at Oxford University and our first lecture was about dtrace! The guy from SUN was blown away by attendance so the higher ups wanted to do more & more events in bigger rooms. But as corporate weeks passed, I started telling them to postpone because everyone was entering the exam sessions. Corporate of course did not listen. Long story short, SUN sent 3 experts but we couldn’t get the crowds and the main lecture room was embarrassingly empty.

As an outsider at the time, when Linux was taking off, there seemed to be a lot of people asking why they wouldn't Open Source Solaris.

It seemed to me like they couldn't decide whether they were a hardware company or a software company.

Mind you, I was young at the time so possibly didn't have the best understanding of the situation. Seems like they left the decision too late though.

Dismissing Linux as a hobbiest OS definitely turned out badly.

I worked at Sun from 1995 to 2004. My take is that Sun had major structural problems all along, but as long as money streamed in from the tech bubble, these issues could be ignored. When the tech bubble ended, it was too late to fix the problems.

One big problem was that there was no cooperation inside Sun. Groups in Sun kind of viewed HP as a competitor, kind of viewed SGI as a competitor, but the real competitor to be destroyed was that other group in Sun. The leaders of the project I worked on spent most of their time in political battles, trying to acquire or outmaneuver the other teams working on similar projects.

Another problem was that the main parts of Sun had conflicting strategies. The Solaris/SunSoft division wanted to run on SPARC, x86, and Power PC for the largest market. The SPARC division, of course, wanted none of that. The hardware division wanted to make expensive servers, but the other teams saw cheaper hardware as the right direction. The market ended up moving to cheap rack-mounted Linux x86 servers, so nobody at Sun won in the end.

There is a simple rule they forgot to follow: never make it difficult for customers to give you money. They had excellent hardware and software but that wasn’t enough to save them.

HN lift of James Gosling's story about the radioactive UltraSparc II

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638929

Part of my maturing as I've gotten older is realizing how much business success actually comes from Sales, BizzDev, Product, etc. Engineering is great, but if you don't have people actually getting things shipped, getting customers, and talking with customers, you will eventually fail. Sure sometimes some internet companies find a money printer and get around this, but I think they are the exceptions to the rule. Sun having great tech, but having a shit sales channel, is not going to lead to success. Dell, small or large, they are going to get you someone on the phone and sell you a server.

Forget the hardware, I feel Sun could of continued their life as the business AWS became.

Later on, when Schwartz was the CEO, they had a datacenter in a shipping container concept selling to management/IT folks. Delivering that infra via APIs to developers being the key differentiator. I'd love to hear Bryan's take since he was involved in the cloud space after he left.

Having missed this era of computing growing up, I have a completely different view of Sun. I see Sun as this legendary old power that invented cool things like ZFS, zones, and lament that they sold themselves to Oracle. It shocks me to read about them making IBM-style mistakes.

First work computer was Sparc IPX, a brief dalliance with HP D and K series, then had various Ultra, and servers were all sorts including E10k then various SunFire, and the Fujitsu Prime Power.

They were quite fun.

But can confirm, buying Sun was PITA.

I worked there right before they sold to Oracle for a bit—my impression was a lot of brilliant engineers but no unified product story.

Wild that around that same time one of my fellow students at university managed to get a free trial of a Sun Thumper shipped to him. It arrived to our campus workplace on a pallet. Just to mess around with. No way was he going to actually purchase the roughly $70,000 machine.

Sun couldn’t handle the cold. Obviously in terms of the dotcom bubble burst, inobviously in terms of the company’s character. The things people loved about Sun (giving Java and NFS away, treating engineers as the point of the company, McNealy's loyalty to his people) were exactly the things that kept it from doing what it needed to survive. Very warm, very caring.

Oracle expressed the opposite. Within a year or two Larry killed OpenSolaris, let the MySQL, Hudson and OpenOffice communities fork away, sued Google over Java, and watched Gosling and most of the engineers who embodied Sun walk out.

The part that rankles the most, and undermines many a retrospective I think, is that Larry the lawnmower turned out to be a better steward of Java & MySQL than Sun was. Coldbloodedness is a survival trait.

Sun was just never really setup to sell lots of small servers. You have different pipeline when your goal is to sell million dollar E10K servers.

I got to see a server installed via crane because they couldn't go up in that building's elevator.

Having read a lot of these things from ex-Sun employees, I dearly want to read one with the topic my department is the one that fucked up Sun. I don't think I have seen a topic like that yet.

We had a similar company in Norway in the 1980ies. Norsk Data (literally means Norwegian Computers) made computers, a multi taskin operating, a word processor thar inspired MS Word, a relational database on the same level as Oracle, the firsr web server was made by Tim Berners-Lee on one of their computers. It all went down because the managers kept insisting that they were a hardware company. The software was supposed to help selling their hardware. They were not good at making hardware.

I'm perceiving a lot of enthusiasts of the race to the bottom here. Yes, Dell and Linux could offer prices and convenience that undercut frontier hardware companies like Sun and SGI. But now what do we have? The loss is palpable to those of us who used to work with varied hardware competing to awe us, not to mention filling niches much more satisfactorily than one-size-fits-all.

I know OP has an intimately inside perspective, whereas what I know about Sun is only from what I read online as an admirer and developer on its platforms… but “gotten bored of the mechanics of running a business” does not match what seemed to be more about having gotten “too enterprise-y” or “too out of touch with the market” and maybe also “too hubristic.”

I interned for Sun and then worked as an MTS in Sun Labs for a couple of years. I miss Sun; I think they were very much an engineer's company that was spoiled by two things: big success in the early workstation market, and the dumb luck of the dot com boom. Sun hardware was solid (even though they fell behind the curve because of mismanagement of a couple of CPU lines), and its kernel (Solaris) was one of the well-engineered kernels ever. While any business makes some bad business decisions from time to time, one thing that was fatal was a crippling enterprise focus that failed to understand the huge growth opportunity that OSS and Linux represented. It was growth in a direction they not only didn't understand, but refused to understand, study, or adapt to.

Sun's heyday was in the boom. The fish were jumping in the boat. So naturally they were building bigger and bigger boats.

There was always the one-off ideas that might have gone here or there, but that core server cow just seemed like an endless source of cash. Thus they neglected the workstation market and ironically, the market for anything bigger than one single server rack. They didn't understand horizontal scaling, and the rise of cheap-but-replaceable consumer hardware like how Google did things was alien to them. They poo-poo'ed Linux, they killed and then unkilled Solaris x86, and a number of other things.

I do miss Sun though. As far as engineering goes, they were a very serious company full of serious engineers. Basically the polar opposite of 10X tech bros and startup culture.

when I was a student in the waning days of Sun, the SPARC/Solaris machines were impenetrable Big Iron guarded closely by the greybeards -- not to be touched by the likes of mere undergrads. Never really did get beyond noodling around with cast off gear from eBay, though I did get to enjoy a bit of it via the Sun DNA in SmartOS years later.

The good thing about Sun (when working at a corporate customer) was that they were very good at getting their distinguished tech people into give talks - Tim Bray, James Gosling etc.

Very expensive and valuable information to come by, thanks for sharing.

I wonder if bcantrill will ever get back into cloud hosting ... to revive his Joyent days (which he alludes to without naming directly in the post).

As someone that buys hardware today, all the hardware companies are now in the "we don't want to do business with you" territory.

How timely, I was just thinking about Sun after doing some office rearranging last week and running into a bunch of sun branded ethernet cables.

While we're reminiscing, I never did understand why Sun paid a billion dollars for MySQL in 2008.

So far the best theory I've heard was that it was bait to make them tastier to IBM and Oracle - but even that seems kind of weak; had they really given up at that point? Does anyone have a better theory?

> all of these homage shirts are amazing

You can't just say that without sharing those too!

Solaris lack of a package manager and crappy patches where patches replaced things wholesale, caused us a lot of overtime, but hey, got me a bigger house! Thanks Sun! Oh btw their hardware was way ahead of their shit software, which wasn’t as bad as shittier IBM or Digital or HP

Yea he’s wrong. Plenty of people switched to dell cause of Linux and open source . In our case the switch was from alpha and vms

Where can one buy the Oxide t-shirt

I liked Sun Microsystems. And they were not that wrong because in 2009, Oracle acquire Sun for 7.4 billion$. Granted, Sun was perhaps more worth at that time; and most definitely before that but it is also not a total disaster either. Except, of course, that Sun died. And I do not like Oracle at all. It is a very different company. Like a slow behemoth - it keeps on bulldozering over but nobody is excited about it while it does so.

I think the big US mega-mega-corporations, while powerful and dominating, also became super-boring. Nobody mentions how epic Google allegedly should be, or is; in 2012 that was much more common. People fatigued from corporate propaganda. And now the AI slop propaganda - that one accelerates disinterest and decay.

I think Sun should probably have pushed more on its key technologies. Simplify java, simplify Solaris while pushing on it hard - who knows what could have happened. It is idle to want to talk about it now though.

Solaris was worse than Linux, and SPARC was worse than Intel. A lot worse.

Even ZFS was way better integrated with the Linux kernel even while Solaris was supposedly maintained.

lol. at first i thought this is going to be about what Sun Tzu got wrong and i was ready to refute.

Speaking of another Steven, the Dell Dude:

Things were going great at Dell until its wildly popular advertising campaign suddenly came tumbling down over an unfortunate indiscretion on the Lower East Side that surprised absolutely nobody...

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/02/10/deli.dude.arrest/

>'Dell Dude' arrested for marijuana possession

>Monday, February 10, 2003 Posted: 3:55 PM EST (2055 GMT)

>NEW YORK (CNN) -- Benjamin Curtis, better known as the "Dell Dude" from the computer company's television commercials, was arrested Sunday while he allegedly attempted to buy marijuana on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Steve The Dell Dude Commercial Compilation (DUDE WE'RE GETTING A DELL!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJxTHMygpDY

Love that t-shirt. Does it have the Meta logo on the back of it? /s

that right

Sun? Sun Microsystem?