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- Hacker News
- 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.
- 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.by grahamlee
- > 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.
by jedberg - 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.
by Zigurd - 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.by labrador
- 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.
by thegagne - 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!
by cryptonector - 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.by coreyh14444