10 ms·

> Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over? Sun Microsystems

by jasallen 7y ago

mongol 7y ago
Do you want to elaborate?
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  Java.
- geofft 7y ago
  https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ from 2002 talks about it a bit: > Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun’s two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and [write-once-run-anywhere]. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it.
  - tw04 7y ago
    >Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it. Sun had excellent engineers but no adults in the room focused on selling the tech or making money. They got drunk off the dotbomb cash influx. They saw that they needed to open source Solaris to properly compete with Linux (and arguably they weren't too late) - but they didn't actually have a plan to make MONEY off that. You can't both give away all your software while simultaneously trying to switch to x86 hardware at the time when x86 had already become a race to the bottom...
    - bcantrill 7y ago
      The E10K -- the former Cray Business Systems Division purchased from SGI for a pittance -- made $1.2B in its first year as a product, and probably still stands as one of the most profitable acquisitions in the history of the industry. (And was due entirely to the adults in the room.) Yes, Sun was badly disrupted by x86 -- but not being able to adapt to economic disruption is really not the same as not being able to "figure out how to make people pay for it." (Indeed, those most fixated on immediate revenue are those for whom economic disruption is most difficult to counter.) To be clear: Sun lost a microprocessor war first and foremost. In my opinion, Sun needed to respond to x86 by being even more iconoclastic than the company had the stomach for at the time: by buying AMD ca. 2004 and fighting the Intel cross-patent poison pill in court. So in the end, Sun's problem was arguably too many adults in the room, not too few...
      - mixmastamyk 7y ago
        The "Innovator's Dilemma" basically. Sun threw gasoline on the fire by giving everything away, but it would have happened anyway.
      - specialist 7y ago
        Buying AMD would have been great. There's always more to the (inside) story. Meaning I have no idea what's going, so should stay humble if I can't keep my mouth shut. James Gosling's shared one theory for the downfall of Sun: radioactive packaging of the hot new UltraSparc-II chips cost the company billions. http://nighthacks.com/jag/blog/336/index.html http://nighthacks.com/jag/blog/336/index.html I so wish Sun had survived. Jini, JavaSpaces, JXTA, grid computing... I recently had to do some AWS Lambda work (serverless & nodejs) and wanted to kill myself. Thank you for sharing your views, theories. It's actually therapeutic.
        saganus 7y ago
        For the curious: > It was deeply random. It's very randomness suggested that maybe it was a physics problem: maybe it was alpha particles or cosmic rays. Maybe it was machines close to nuclear power plants. One site experiencing problems was near Fermilab. We actually mapped out failures geographically to see if they correlated to such particle sources. Nope. In desperation, a bright hardware engineer decided to measure the radioactivity of the systems themselves. Bingo! Particles! But from where? Much detailed scanning and it turned out that the packaging of the cache ram chips we were using was noticeably radioactive.
Artemis2 7y ago
Xerox PARC!
bcantrill 7y ago
Sun made $200 billion of revenue over 28 years. Yes, Sun missed opportunities -- but (as someone who worked at Sun during the internet boom) Sun definitely took advantage of plenty of them. Or are you making the case that Sun's technological output was so substantial that the $200 billion over the nearly three decades represents a "bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker"?
- mromanuk 7y ago
  In 1999 I wanted to buy a Sun SPARCstation 5 (I worked with those). Was fabulous how that machine never blocked, was super-stable, and fast. At that time I had a linux PC box (red hat) at home, with IDE and PATA (if I remember correctly) it was really difficult for the hardware to perform.
  - wmf 7y ago
    Yeah, anything was better than ISA and IDE. But a PC with PCI and SCSI was much closer to SPARC/Alpha/MIPS/etc. performance at 1/Nth the price.
  - ska 7y ago
    The were good machines, but they were stupidly expensive a that time. The same with SGI. I remember being quoted $18,000 for equivalent amount of memory I had just put in a linux box of my own for about $300. Sure, it wasn't really apples to apples ... but still. Intel based machines were eating their lunch for good reason.
    - joncrane 7y ago
      They should have targeted a premium around what Apple charges for their hardware, not the absurd multiple they were charging.
      - gumby 7y ago
        Both sun and sgi had business models built around premium margins and couldn’t adapt the the mammals underfoot. This phenomenon is one of the things that The Innovator’s Dilemma got right. Apple’s in a slightly different position in that they bank a more profit sun/sgi ever did and are pretty aggressive on COGS so if/when they lose their exalted position they will have a lot more room to maneuver. This is how Microsoft managed to survive its sag (decline is too strong anword) towards irrelevance and recover. IBM was in the same situation as Microsoft but though Gerstner managed to right the ship, his successors were not able to re-ignite growth (to mix metaphors)
stelfer 7y ago
No offense to all the great people working at Docker over the years-- but after they came to see us right after they raised their series B, it immediately occurred to me that they had hired _all_ of the wrong people. I don't recall having had that visceral of a reaction like that with any other company. I think from the beginning they didn't really have a plan and it really showed IMO.
ljm 7y ago
Missed opportunity or a contribution to where we are now? I don’t reckon any of them failed, they succeeded in an unexpected way.
not_real_acct 7y ago
don't make me cry

> Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over? Sun Microsystems

mongol 7y ago

Do you want to elaborate?

etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
Java.
geofft 7y ago
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ from 2002 talks about it a bit: > Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun’s two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and [write-once-run-anywhere]. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it.
- tw04 7y ago
  >Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it. Sun had excellent engineers but no adults in the room focused on selling the tech or making money. They got drunk off the dotbomb cash influx. They saw that they needed to open source Solaris to properly compete with Linux (and arguably they weren't too late) - but they didn't actually have a plan to make MONEY off that. You can't both give away all your software while simultaneously trying to switch to x86 hardware at the time when x86 had already become a race to the bottom...
  - bcantrill 7y ago
    The E10K -- the former Cray Business Systems Division purchased from SGI for a pittance -- made $1.2B in its first year as a product, and probably still stands as one of the most profitable acquisitions in the history of the industry. (And was due entirely to the adults in the room.) Yes, Sun was badly disrupted by x86 -- but not being able to adapt to economic disruption is really not the same as not being able to "figure out how to make people pay for it." (Indeed, those most fixated on immediate revenue are those for whom economic disruption is most difficult to counter.) To be clear: Sun lost a microprocessor war first and foremost. In my opinion, Sun needed to respond to x86 by being even more iconoclastic than the company had the stomach for at the time: by buying AMD ca. 2004 and fighting the Intel cross-patent poison pill in court. So in the end, Sun's problem was arguably too many adults in the room, not too few...
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      The "Innovator's Dilemma" basically. Sun threw gasoline on the fire by giving everything away, but it would have happened anyway.
    - specialist 7y ago
      Buying AMD would have been great. There's always more to the (inside) story. Meaning I have no idea what's going, so should stay humble if I can't keep my mouth shut. James Gosling's shared one theory for the downfall of Sun: radioactive packaging of the hot new UltraSparc-II chips cost the company billions. http://nighthacks.com/jag/blog/336/index.html http://nighthacks.com/jag/blog/336/index.html I so wish Sun had survived. Jini, JavaSpaces, JXTA, grid computing... I recently had to do some AWS Lambda work (serverless & nodejs) and wanted to kill myself. Thank you for sharing your views, theories. It's actually therapeutic.
      - saganus 7y ago
        For the curious: > It was deeply random. It's very randomness suggested that maybe it was a physics problem: maybe it was alpha particles or cosmic rays. Maybe it was machines close to nuclear power plants. One site experiencing problems was near Fermilab. We actually mapped out failures geographically to see if they correlated to such particle sources. Nope. In desperation, a bright hardware engineer decided to measure the radioactivity of the systems themselves. Bingo! Particles! But from where? Much detailed scanning and it turned out that the packaging of the cache ram chips we were using was noticeably radioactive.

Artemis2 7y ago

Xerox PARC!

bcantrill 7y ago

Sun made $200 billion of revenue over 28 years. Yes, Sun missed opportunities -- but (as someone who worked at Sun during the internet boom) Sun definitely took advantage of plenty of them. Or are you making the case that Sun's technological output was so substantial that the $200 billion over the nearly three decades represents a "bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker"?

mromanuk 7y ago
In 1999 I wanted to buy a Sun SPARCstation 5 (I worked with those). Was fabulous how that machine never blocked, was super-stable, and fast. At that time I had a linux PC box (red hat) at home, with IDE and PATA (if I remember correctly) it was really difficult for the hardware to perform.
- wmf 7y ago
  Yeah, anything was better than ISA and IDE. But a PC with PCI and SCSI was much closer to SPARC/Alpha/MIPS/etc. performance at 1/Nth the price.
- ska 7y ago
  The were good machines, but they were stupidly expensive a that time. The same with SGI. I remember being quoted $18,000 for equivalent amount of memory I had just put in a linux box of my own for about $300. Sure, it wasn't really apples to apples ... but still. Intel based machines were eating their lunch for good reason.
  - joncrane 7y ago
    They should have targeted a premium around what Apple charges for their hardware, not the absurd multiple they were charging.
    - gumby 7y ago
      Both sun and sgi had business models built around premium margins and couldn’t adapt the the mammals underfoot. This phenomenon is one of the things that The Innovator’s Dilemma got right. Apple’s in a slightly different position in that they bank a more profit sun/sgi ever did and are pretty aggressive on COGS so if/when they lose their exalted position they will have a lot more room to maneuver. This is how Microsoft managed to survive its sag (decline is too strong anword) towards irrelevance and recover. IBM was in the same situation as Microsoft but though Gerstner managed to right the ship, his successors were not able to re-ignite growth (to mix metaphors)

stelfer 7y ago

No offense to all the great people working at Docker over the years-- but after they came to see us right after they raised their series B, it immediately occurred to me that they had hired _all_ of the wrong people. I don't recall having had that visceral of a reaction like that with any other company. I think from the beginning they didn't really have a plan and it really showed IMO.

ljm 7y ago

Missed opportunity or a contribution to where we are now? I don’t reckon any of them failed, they succeeded in an unexpected way.

not_real_acct 7y ago

don't make me cry