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Ironically, some people blame the failure of Sun on Jonathan Schwartz being too open and not generating enough revenue. What killed Sun was classic innovators
by goatinaboat 6y ago
Ironically, some people blame the failure of Sun on Jonathan Schwartz being too open and not generating enough revenue.
What killed Sun was classic innovators dilemma, they could have pivoted into making highly reliable x86 kit running Solaris and existing SPARC customers would have lapped it up, but they held onto to trying to sell SPARC for too long and by then their SPARC customers realised that they could make do with commodity x86 kit, just buy twice as much of it and shrug when it broke.
The bigger picture was that Intel got "good enough" and while SPARC performance was still better, it started to lose badly on price/performance and the software industry adapted to that by architecting and writing code suited to the Intel model of many cheaper machines.