4 ms·

It's terrible when your favorite toy is also the anchor weighing you down to the sea floor.

• nailer 16y ago
  That's true. If Sun decided to do Linux x86 at a price point similar to Red Hat in say, 2003 I think they'd be alive now.
  • chrisaycock 16y ago
    From the linked El Reg article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open_source/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open... > Sun should, McNealy told us, have sold and supported Solaris on its own x86 hardware. Instead, Sun took the fatal decision of outsourcing that role: it placed its trust in OEMs such as Dell to sell and support Sun's Unix on their Intel boxes. Problem was, these were the very same OEMs who, it emerged during the US Department of Justice's (DoJ) antitrust prosecution of Microsoft, had had their arms twisted into offering only Windows with Internet Explorer on PCs or risk losing access to Windows on their machines.
    • nailer 16y ago
      People don't like using Solaris. Regardless of the recent kernel innovations, the userspace - packaging, compiler toolchain, command line UI and GUI, support for modern keyboard layouts in vi - most people prefer GNU to Sun, and Sun never addressed this. Sol 10 had some great stuff in kernelspace, but a shitty userland on x86 wouldn't have solved Sun's problems.
  • btilly 16y ago
    Sounds good, but it was probably impossible for them. Once you have a heavy-weight sales and support infrastructure, it is extremely hard to strip it back down to compete in a low end market. The classic that walks through the relevant organizational dynamics is The Innovator's Solution. (This is the follow-up to the better known The Innovator's Dilemma, and it focuses on what happens within companies facing that particular dilemma.) I highly recommend it.