(This article reminds me of Nokia, whose software divisions must have suffered at the hands of hardware-dominated managers.) Solaris x86 could have been a viab

(This article reminds me of Nokia, whose software divisions must have suffered at the hands of hardware-dominated managers.) Solaris x86 could have been a viable challenger to Red Hat had it been open sourced and free. Unfortunately, the presence of Linux-as-a-movement and IBM's backing meant that Solaris's success was far from assured. A movement is like an earthquake. By the time the earth is shaking it is already too late. Java did well on the server-side, but Java on the client-side left a big vacuum which Adobe proceeded fill. I remembered the early days of AWT where the demos ran better on Microsoft's JVM than on Sun's JVM. Sun Java was far from performant then. Meanwhile, Swing was designed to look good on Solaris but is pretty much alien-looking on Windows. It was excruciatingly slow in the early days. I remembered how refreshingly fast SWT ran on Eclipse 1.0.