5 ms·

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

by 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.

by 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.