4 ms·

Gosling: So Long Old Friend

78 points by fogus 17y ago

rbanffy 17y ago
a) Sun is not dead - the brand is still relevant, It's nice for Oracle to have a hardware branch. b) The illustration is not appropriate (Sun is not dead, see a) c) If Gosling is leaving Sun, it's totally inappropriate to leave with an illustration that more or less declares his former employer dead. This isn't nice.
- whyenot 17y ago
  I think we've seen enough Oracle acquisitions to have a pretty good idea what will happen next. Oracle will absorb the good parts, the rest will be tossed into the bay.
  - j_baker 17y ago
    I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but could you give me an example of what you're talking about?
    - zandorg 17y ago
      Sleepycat?
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    If that means they toss Sun's upper management into the bay, I am all in for that.
- mbreese 17y ago
  Yes it is... Sun the company (and culture) is very much dead. It's only a matter of time before the ticker symbol "JAVA" stops tickering. The brand might still have some value, but I'm not sure how much... or if it wouldn't be better for Oracle to rebrand Sun gear as Oracle gear. My first thought though was "Gosling is leaving Sun?" That didn't make much sense to me either...
  - kls 17y ago
    Not only that but I believe that Java just fragmented. we will see IBM Java, Oracle Java, Apache Java and JBoss Java.
    - mbreese 17y ago
      We already have that though... Now Oracle even has two: Sun's and BEA's. The only thing that was keeping it together was the JCP and the test suite. I'm not sure what is going to come out of that. Whatever it is, I wouldn't put any money on the process getting any better or faster. Perhaps we'll start to see more things like Dalvik. It's like Java the language, but not Java(tm).
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    If you mean the culture that mismanaged Sun into oblivion, yes, hopefully, it's dead. I trust Larry Ellison has, at least, the gift of identifying what's wrong. Sun is far more interesting than the JAVA ticker may betray. They have an impressive lineup of servers, processors, compilers and OSs, all of them being able to do stuff most competitors cannot even approach. It's however, a dysfunctional and disjointed collection of very cool technologies that add little or no value to the Sun brand because almost nobody a) knows Sun still exists and b) knows the technologies exist. Now we can bitch about what they haven't done, and what hit products they didn't launch and how an incredibly cool company ended up being part of the ultimate uncool one. It could be worse. It could be Microsoft.
- melling 17y ago
  Denial is a wonderful thing. People said that "Sun was setting" for about a decade. The warnings were ignored and now the entity known as Sun is gone. The world would have been a better place if it survived. RIP.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    I still believe a change of management can cure whatever good is left of the company. Ellison is ruthless, but is not dumb.
jacquesm 17y ago
That was not funny. I saw the title and thought: "Oh shit, James Gosling dead".
- nfnaaron 17y ago
  My thought too.
- kqr2 17y ago
  Yes, that's what I thought too. Perhaps a moderator can update the link title.
- edw519 17y ago
  It really scared me. He and I have a lot in common... We were born on the same day. He earned his PhD at Carnegie-Mellon at the same time I earned my MBA down the street at Pitt. We both made it to California in the 80's. Neither of us embraced anything Microsoft. He invented Java and I drank Java. We still haven't met. Someday, I hope. fogus, please fix that title.
  - huhtenberg 17y ago
    Not to forget that you both eat salt.
  - winter_blue 17y ago
    Yes, please fix that title.
- nickpp 17y ago
  OK, that really sucked. Please don't do it again. Gosling is ALIVE!
- fogus 17y ago
  Hmm, it didn't strike me that the title would come off as a RIP. I suck. I can no longer fix the title, but would if I could.
dschobel 17y ago
I think it's in response to: 21/01/2010 15:12 (10:09 minutes ago) The FINANCIAL -- The European Commission has approved under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of US hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems Inc. by Oracle Corporation, a US enterprise software company. http://www.finchannel.com/Main_News/Business/56479_EU_approves_Oracles_bid_for_Sun_Microsystems_/ http://www.finchannel.com/Main_News/Business/56479_EU_approv...
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Specially to the "light a candle part"...
wooster 17y ago
It's interesting to compare this to the Apple acquisition of NeXT, wherein the NeXT engineers wore t-shirts depicting the NeXT cube eating the Apple logo.
- abstractbill 17y ago
  That's awesome! Do you happen to know if there are any photos floating around? Google Images couldn't find anything for me.
  - dbul 17y ago
    http://www.jewelryluv.com/WebObjects/Jewelry.woa/Contents/WebServerResources/NeXT_Apple_lunch.jpg http://www.jewelryluv.com/WebObjects/Jewelry.woa/Contents/We... Bing images (where I found that) and Bing maps have been a great resource for me. Google is still empirically top for web search, though.
- angelbob 17y ago
  Can you imagine the kind of indigestion that eating Oracle would give you?
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Actually that's more or less what happened. A current-day Mac is more a NeXT than a Mac.
abstractbill 17y ago
I got my start with Unix on a SPARCstation while interning at British Telecom. I used it to build a website (using C++ and Oracle for the backend - must have been in 1993 or 1994, when the web was still fairly uncommon outside of big companies and academia). I clearly remember coming home from work and raving to axod about how rad Sun was because they did some fairly high-level graphics operations in hardware (at the time he was doing a lot of VGA programming in x86 assembler, so I think this impressed him).
neovive 17y ago
What ever happened to the Save MySQL petition started by Monty? I guess MariaDB will start gaining some traction in the near future.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Or not. Or Drizzle. Or PostgreSQL.
nas 17y ago
A pretty classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma, IMHO. Sun hardware was kickass but cheap PC servers eventually beat them out.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Insane market positioning. They aimed for the high-end server market. Sun has nothing in the price-range of a low-end Dell. It's not that it's impossible to do - I bet they could. They just never tried because building high-end stuff is way cooler. Being Windows-proof didn't help either. It is a virtue on my book, but not many people agree with me.
  - hga 17y ago
    See my comment about how Sun made it impossible for a start up to buy a moderate quantity of these servers. People were willing to buy Sun quality but ended up buying Dell because Dell wanted to do business with them, which then lost them the follow on sales for those who made it big.
zandorg 17y ago
In the image, it's got the Linux penguin mourning the company it helped to kill, and yet nobody mentions Linux in the whole comments thread? Just curious... Is the other creature BSD or Amiga?
- jurjenh 17y ago
  I'm pretty sure that's the Java thingy (for lack of a better term) - not sure if it's actually got a name or not...
  - angelbob 17y ago
    Yup, that's what it is. I don't know what they meant it to be, but it always looked like a Ouija puck to me.
  - tspiteri 17y ago
    He is the Java mascot, and his name is Duke. http://kenai.com/projects/duke/pages/Home http://kenai.com/projects/duke/pages/Home
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Linux didn't kill Sun. Sun killed itself. Low-end servers were coming and anybody could see it back in the mid-90s. Sun instead refused to see it. They focused on the very profitable - for a time - high-end stuff and neglected the other end of the spectrum. After it was brutally obvious this strategy ("stragedy"?) wouldn't work, they decided to make some of the coolest and more expensive x86 boxes money could buy. They made suicidal mistake after suicidal mistake.
  - hga 17y ago
    That might have worked IF: Startups could have bought them. It was very hard to buy Sun hardware in the quantities between what you could put on a credit card and the equivalent of a mainframe installation. A lot of people who wanted to buy Sun ended up buying Dell servers and that deprived Sun of the sales they would have made for the companies that were big hits. They had kept their hardware configurations consistent. A number of big customers dropped them because they kept changing things like the management interface, Ethernet chip (Intel to nVidia chipset), etc. Sometimes their SATA device driver support was less than stellar (I saw this as someone who wanted to run Solaris in the 2007-8 period on a Tyan motherboard that Sun OEMed) and I have to wonder about other device drivers (Sun wasn't all that good at fixing serious bugs). Unconnected, but devastating: they burned a tremendous amount of credibility in enterprise server space when they had a flaky cache problem and required their customers to sign an NDA before they would get service ... and then tended to blame the customer for server room environment problems. A different attitude was needed if they wanted sustained success in this place, which for them developed very quickly after they bought that SMP Sparc system from SGI. One bottom line is just too many failures to execute.

78 points by fogus 17y ago

a) Sun is not dead - the brand is still relevant, It's nice for Oracle to have a hardware branch. b) The illustration is not appropriate (Sun is not dead, see a) c) If Gosling is leaving Sun, it's totally inappropriate to leave with an illustration that more or less declares his former employer dead. This isn't nice.

whyenot 17y ago
I think we've seen enough Oracle acquisitions to have a pretty good idea what will happen next. Oracle will absorb the good parts, the rest will be tossed into the bay.
- j_baker 17y ago
  I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but could you give me an example of what you're talking about?
  - zandorg 17y ago
    Sleepycat?
- rbanffy 17y ago
  If that means they toss Sun's upper management into the bay, I am all in for that.
mbreese 17y ago
Yes it is... Sun the company (and culture) is very much dead. It's only a matter of time before the ticker symbol "JAVA" stops tickering. The brand might still have some value, but I'm not sure how much... or if it wouldn't be better for Oracle to rebrand Sun gear as Oracle gear. My first thought though was "Gosling is leaving Sun?" That didn't make much sense to me either...
- kls 17y ago
  Not only that but I believe that Java just fragmented. we will see IBM Java, Oracle Java, Apache Java and JBoss Java.
  - mbreese 17y ago
    We already have that though... Now Oracle even has two: Sun's and BEA's. The only thing that was keeping it together was the JCP and the test suite. I'm not sure what is going to come out of that. Whatever it is, I wouldn't put any money on the process getting any better or faster. Perhaps we'll start to see more things like Dalvik. It's like Java the language, but not Java(tm).
- rbanffy 17y ago
  If you mean the culture that mismanaged Sun into oblivion, yes, hopefully, it's dead. I trust Larry Ellison has, at least, the gift of identifying what's wrong. Sun is far more interesting than the JAVA ticker may betray. They have an impressive lineup of servers, processors, compilers and OSs, all of them being able to do stuff most competitors cannot even approach. It's however, a dysfunctional and disjointed collection of very cool technologies that add little or no value to the Sun brand because almost nobody a) knows Sun still exists and b) knows the technologies exist. Now we can bitch about what they haven't done, and what hit products they didn't launch and how an incredibly cool company ended up being part of the ultimate uncool one. It could be worse. It could be Microsoft.
melling 17y ago
Denial is a wonderful thing. People said that "Sun was setting" for about a decade. The warnings were ignored and now the entity known as Sun is gone. The world would have been a better place if it survived. RIP.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  I still believe a change of management can cure whatever good is left of the company. Ellison is ruthless, but is not dumb.

jacquesm 17y ago

That was not funny. I saw the title and thought: "Oh shit, James Gosling dead".

nfnaaron 17y ago
My thought too.
kqr2 17y ago
Yes, that's what I thought too. Perhaps a moderator can update the link title.
edw519 17y ago
It really scared me. He and I have a lot in common... We were born on the same day. He earned his PhD at Carnegie-Mellon at the same time I earned my MBA down the street at Pitt. We both made it to California in the 80's. Neither of us embraced anything Microsoft. He invented Java and I drank Java. We still haven't met. Someday, I hope. fogus, please fix that title.
- huhtenberg 17y ago
  Not to forget that you both eat salt.
- winter_blue 17y ago
  Yes, please fix that title.
nickpp 17y ago
OK, that really sucked. Please don't do it again. Gosling is ALIVE!
fogus 17y ago
Hmm, it didn't strike me that the title would come off as a RIP. I suck. I can no longer fix the title, but would if I could.

dschobel 17y ago

I think it's in response to: 21/01/2010 15:12 (10:09 minutes ago) The FINANCIAL -- The European Commission has approved under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of US hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems Inc. by Oracle Corporation, a US enterprise software company. http://www.finchannel.com/Main_News/Business/56479_EU_approves_Oracles_bid_for_Sun_Microsystems_/ http://www.finchannel.com/Main_News/Business/56479_EU_approv...

rbanffy 17y ago
Specially to the "light a candle part"...

wooster 17y ago

It's interesting to compare this to the Apple acquisition of NeXT, wherein the NeXT engineers wore t-shirts depicting the NeXT cube eating the Apple logo.

abstractbill 17y ago
That's awesome! Do you happen to know if there are any photos floating around? Google Images couldn't find anything for me.
- dbul 17y ago
  http://www.jewelryluv.com/WebObjects/Jewelry.woa/Contents/WebServerResources/NeXT_Apple_lunch.jpg http://www.jewelryluv.com/WebObjects/Jewelry.woa/Contents/We... Bing images (where I found that) and Bing maps have been a great resource for me. Google is still empirically top for web search, though.
angelbob 17y ago
Can you imagine the kind of indigestion that eating Oracle would give you?
rbanffy 17y ago
Actually that's more or less what happened. A current-day Mac is more a NeXT than a Mac.

abstractbill 17y ago

I got my start with Unix on a SPARCstation while interning at British Telecom. I used it to build a website (using C++ and Oracle for the backend - must have been in 1993 or 1994, when the web was still fairly uncommon outside of big companies and academia). I clearly remember coming home from work and raving to axod about how rad Sun was because they did some fairly high-level graphics operations in hardware (at the time he was doing a lot of VGA programming in x86 assembler, so I think this impressed him).

neovive 17y ago

What ever happened to the Save MySQL petition started by Monty? I guess MariaDB will start gaining some traction in the near future.

rbanffy 17y ago
Or not. Or Drizzle. Or PostgreSQL.

nas 17y ago

A pretty classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma, IMHO. Sun hardware was kickass but cheap PC servers eventually beat them out.

rbanffy 17y ago
Insane market positioning. They aimed for the high-end server market. Sun has nothing in the price-range of a low-end Dell. It's not that it's impossible to do - I bet they could. They just never tried because building high-end stuff is way cooler. Being Windows-proof didn't help either. It is a virtue on my book, but not many people agree with me.
- hga 17y ago
  See my comment about how Sun made it impossible for a start up to buy a moderate quantity of these servers. People were willing to buy Sun quality but ended up buying Dell because Dell wanted to do business with them, which then lost them the follow on sales for those who made it big.

zandorg 17y ago

In the image, it's got the Linux penguin mourning the company it helped to kill, and yet nobody mentions Linux in the whole comments thread? Just curious... Is the other creature BSD or Amiga?

jurjenh 17y ago
I'm pretty sure that's the Java thingy (for lack of a better term) - not sure if it's actually got a name or not...
- angelbob 17y ago
  Yup, that's what it is. I don't know what they meant it to be, but it always looked like a Ouija puck to me.
- tspiteri 17y ago
  He is the Java mascot, and his name is Duke. http://kenai.com/projects/duke/pages/Home http://kenai.com/projects/duke/pages/Home
rbanffy 17y ago
Linux didn't kill Sun. Sun killed itself. Low-end servers were coming and anybody could see it back in the mid-90s. Sun instead refused to see it. They focused on the very profitable - for a time - high-end stuff and neglected the other end of the spectrum. After it was brutally obvious this strategy ("stragedy"?) wouldn't work, they decided to make some of the coolest and more expensive x86 boxes money could buy. They made suicidal mistake after suicidal mistake.
- hga 17y ago
  That might have worked IF: Startups could have bought them. It was very hard to buy Sun hardware in the quantities between what you could put on a credit card and the equivalent of a mainframe installation. A lot of people who wanted to buy Sun ended up buying Dell servers and that deprived Sun of the sales they would have made for the companies that were big hits. They had kept their hardware configurations consistent. A number of big customers dropped them because they kept changing things like the management interface, Ethernet chip (Intel to nVidia chipset), etc. Sometimes their SATA device driver support was less than stellar (I saw this as someone who wanted to run Solaris in the 2007-8 period on a Tyan motherboard that Sun OEMed) and I have to wonder about other device drivers (Sun wasn't all that good at fixing serious bugs). Unconnected, but devastating: they burned a tremendous amount of credibility in enterprise server space when they had a flaky cache problem and required their customers to sign an NDA before they would get service ... and then tended to blame the customer for server room environment problems. A different attitude was needed if they wanted sustained success in this place, which for them developed very quickly after they bought that SMP Sparc system from SGI. One bottom line is just too many failures to execute.