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Comments (92)

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  coreyh14444
  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.
• tiffanyh
  I wonder if bcantrill will ever get back into cloud hosting and revive his Joyent days (which he alludes to without naming directly in the post).
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  thegagne
  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.
• keeda
  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.”
• labrador
  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.
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  grahamlee
  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.
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  Zigurd
  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.
• nielsbot
  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.
• gadders
  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.
• ecshafer
  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.
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  kens
  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.
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  titzer
  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.
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  cmdrk
  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.
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  justin66
  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.
• cmiller1
  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.
• anon
  undefined
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  ImJasonH
  > all of these homage shirts are amazingYou can't just say that without sharing those too!
• whalesalad
  Where can one buy the Oxide t-shirt
• traveltalk
  that right
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  strappymcneeler
  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
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  flanked-evergl
  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.
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  DonHopkins
  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
• ChrisArchitect
  Love that t-shirt. Does it have the Meta logo on the back of it? /s