Tech community discusses Sun's broader failures and legacy
1 Sep 21 · 5d ago · 2 posts · 11 comments · 2 sources · development 1 of 1
Commenters on Lobsters elaborate on additional dimensions of Sun's dysfunction: architectural decisions hampered by organizational silos (SPARC design), over-investment in Java ecosystems instead of OS-level solutions, and loss of focus despite major technological contributions including NFS, ZFS, and Java. Multiple voices acknowledge Sun's significant achievements while critiquing its operational and strategic missteps.
“Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.”
Bryan Cantrill, Oxide founder, former Sun employee · hn ↗
Bryan Cantrill Oxide Computer founder, former Sun employeeScott McNealy Former Sun CEOSun Microsystems Computing company (defunct)
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2 outlets What Sun got wrong
first by HN Best, 5d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people said 24 voices · best of 111 · verbatim
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Sun did a lot of other things wrong. I only saw it from the outside but when your corporate dysfunction is obvious from thousands of miles away it’s clear you need to do something different. With SPARC, they had a fairly solid architecture that, with a few tweaks (asynchronous spilling of register windows!) could have been an amazing architecture…
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I was working in a UK financial blue chip (FTSE 100/high street bank) from 1999 to 2008 where I got my main Sun exposure.I loved the Sun kit and Solaris. Touched everything from Sparc workstations to E10K/E15K. It felt like home!A random selection of areas where they went wrong from my viewpoint as a junior to senior unix admin at the…
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> Just Java or ZFS are enough to get into computing history, and they did so much more. Most importantly: NFS. Which they then open sourced and which became the de-facto standard file-sharing protocol for UNIX-like systems. The OpenStep specification was a collaboration between NeXT and Sun (this is why the class names start with NS for NeXT-Sun…
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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…
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> When your own software runs better on your competitor’s hardware (and better on their OS) than your own, you’ve done a lot of things wrong. I realize this is quite off topic, but this sentence reminds me a lot of how many Windows games now run better and more performant on Linux using the Wine compatibility layer. I suppose it shows the…
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Here is my experience with Sun and why they failed in the 00s: LinuxThe only way you could get people with Solaris experience was to hire people from colleges where students had access to expensive hard to access servers. This limited the number of people a company could hire to handle their Solaris servers.I remember being told by the now…
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It's really important to remember the context for a lot of these things. When Java was released, web browsers were very simple. JavaScript wasn't a thing yet and, when JavaScript was first released, most of the things needed for dynamic UIs weren't there yet. Browsers did support plugins. Flash existed but I never heard about FutureWave Flash, the…
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I was a systems engineer aka sales engineer aka technical account manager for Sun and I worked evenings and fought like hell to do the best for customers, having previously been a Sun customer.Perhaps my story will explain what others experienced. I flew out to visit a customer on my first day on the job with the most capable sales rep in the…
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To me, this is more of an example of how tech excellence is just a small factor in success. Just Java or ZFS are enough to get into computing history, and they did so much more. (And I feel Oracle was responsible for a big chunk of accessibility of GNOME. My theory is that they were one of the last companies trying to sell UNIX-like workstations…
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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…
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> With SPARC, they had a fairly solid architecture that, with a few tweaks (asynchronous spilling of register windows!) could have been an amazing architecture. I think it's fair to say that if "a few tweaks" could have made it an amazing architecture then it would at least slowly have improved over the years in that direction. I'm also entirely…
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> Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell.In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.Dell was obviously a top…
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> The link to Etoile in the alternatives they list is timing out for me Yup, I got sidetracked from Étoilé designing hardware because the things I wanted to do with Étoilé are very hard (if not impossible) with existing hardware. I hope to get back to it any decade now.
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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…
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You're giving Knuth a run for his money on the yak shaving, eh?
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Yeah, and then Dell more-or-less turned into that. Companies get big, customers and sales get more complicated, process gets more calcified.SUNW would probably still be around if the whole x86 commodity pizza box revolution hadn't happened OR if they had pivoted away from SPARC earlier and went heavily into x86. Example: buying from IBM doesn't…
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Other notable things that Sun did: * They defined what unix shared libraries should look like from the programmer and build system point of view; ELF followed Sun’s a.out design and made it more elaborate. * Pluggable authentication modules * Name service switch Both of which have a regrettable reliance on loading random shared libraries into…
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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…
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All of these are pretty bad, in various ways. The modern UNIX shared object model tries very hard to provide an easy migration path from static linking. Any kind of symbol can be exported. This ends up with horrific things like copy relocations. Windows has a more MULTICS-inspired model where shared libraries are both richer (you can define shared…
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I remember we where a sunos/ hpux shop. I was working on a compatability layer that allowed our ada to call out to the underlying OS. You figured system V would make them the same, but no.. So many #IFDEFs.. Sun's where our display and console machines. SunOS (it was the early 2000s..) had some weird network quirks (of course the udp multicast bug…
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I think that’s true of SPARCv9. Linux performance as *terrible* on v8 because it didn’t properly use the tagged TLB and because it used an x86-style radix tree as the canonical source and walked it on every TLB miss fault. We had some HyperSPARC machines that were used as dumb X terminals. When we moved from Linux to NetBSD, they suddenly went…
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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…
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There may be a sort of anti-survivor bias at play here: sure, many failed efforts were hampered by disfunctional organizations, but maybe this is less correlated than you would think because the successful technologies also come from disfunctional organizations? (I would not be surprised if similar-sounding horror stories could be found about…
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Gwern has a great article [0] about commoditizing your complements as a strategy to both boost demand for your product and keep competitors at bay. (this was originally an idea put forth by Joel Spolsky).He points out that Sun, a hardware company, was smart to work on open source window managers to make it easier to use their hardware.In turn…
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