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I worked for Sun. The company mindset never shifted from building big-iron megaservers. Which is a shame because the workstation market lulled for a bit, but is

by titzer 5y ago

I worked for Sun. The company mindset never shifted from building big-iron megaservers. Which is a shame because the workstation market lulled for a bit, but is actually back with a vengeance nowadays with heavy-duty GPUs, beefy CPUs, etc, for media and video editing--think $20k workstations. Apple has a slice of that market and a few PC manufacturers that focus on that, and it's very profitable. Not million dollar server profitable, but profitable. Sun neglected its own very profitable workstation line in favor of the server market, which was completely rocked by the dot com bust. Sun, with Java, which hides SPARC vs x86 could have made the entire cloud happen a decade earlier. But SPARC was a performance loser compared to Intel and Sun just stubbornly refused to see the horizontal scaling forest for the giant E10k trees.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Yep, complete waste of talents and specialties -- for a company which had its genesis in amazing workstations to have lost its edge there is sad.
pjmlp 5y ago
Also, who knows how it would have turned out if they had actually doubled down on OpenSTEP and DOE, instead of ramping them down in Java's favour. Or if they had invested into AOT and JIT caching options for Java instead of leaving them to third parties. Both options could have made Solaris more interesting, maybe.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  It was really hard to resist the tidal wave of commodity x86 hardware at that point in time. Nobody did, not even Apple. And the server market got eaten by Linux, Solaris had no serious advantage anymore despite being a quality product. It really is a different story now, though. There's room for more diversity, though they'd probably have to have made the switch to Linux. Open sourcing Solaris earlier on before Linux ate the whole market -- or embracing Linux, or taking some hybrid approach, could maybe have kept them relevant.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Many would state that even today there are quite a few features that Solaris does much better than Linux, but so is "progress".
ben1040 5y ago
>Sun, with Java, which hides SPARC vs x86 could have made the entire cloud happen a decade earlier. All they had to do was live their trademark tagline, "the network is the computer." Which I learned today was abandoned by Sun or Oracle and was adopted and re-registered as a trademark by Cloudflare in 2019.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  They did, from SUN RPC, they moved into Distributed Objects Everywhere with Objective-C/OpenSTEP, which then gave birth to RMI and J2EE. Containers are basically Java application servers, rebooted as language agnostic OS services.
CalChris 5y ago
I don't know that SPARC was such a performance loser to x86 so much as Intel simply having a commanding lead in process technology at the time. Even Apple capitulated. That lead gave them a market domination that allowed them to reinvest (think Amazon) in their own fabs. x86 was a dog that Intel spent $1B/yr on improving so that your code ran fast. They took that strategy to the bank for as long as they could which was at least a decade longer than anyone thought they could. As I think you're pointing out, Java wasn't a pivot. It was rather an excuse not to pivot. Sun really needed a Gates style pivot with Internet Explorer or a Bezos style pivot with his services manifesto. Instead you got a ponytail. Also, before missing the cloud, Sun missed routers. Still, they were a pretty successful failure. We should all fail so well.
- titzer 5y ago
  Oh, it was totally. Sun lost at least two generations of microarchitectures to mismanagement. They resisted doing out-of-order execution far too long and they just could never keep up with single-core performance. Even process technology would not have been able to rescue the comparatively sophomoric micro-architecture. Intel and AMD and IBM just totally outclassed them.
- Melkman 5y ago
  Sun didn't miss routers... The part of Stanford University Network that went to do routers used an other name: Cisco.
- hapless 5y ago
  SPARC rapidly became a performance loser to x86. And, at the time, Intel had no process advantage. None at all. Intel Pentium II was almost exactly 100% as fast as UltraSPARC IIi, on the same process (350 nm), at about 1/20th the cost. That was the last competitive Sun SPARC product, after that they were all brutally slow. The less said about US III and US IV, the better. By the time that Sun put itself on the auction block, their internal CPUs weren't even good enough for legacy customers. They were obliged to start re-selling Fujitsu SPARC products just to keep SPARC loyalists inside the tent.
  - 5y ago

by titzer 5y ago

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Yep, complete waste of talents and specialties -- for a company which had its genesis in amazing workstations to have lost its edge there is sad.

pjmlp 5y ago

Also, who knows how it would have turned out if they had actually doubled down on OpenSTEP and DOE, instead of ramping them down in Java's favour. Or if they had invested into AOT and JIT caching options for Java instead of leaving them to third parties. Both options could have made Solaris more interesting, maybe.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
It was really hard to resist the tidal wave of commodity x86 hardware at that point in time. Nobody did, not even Apple. And the server market got eaten by Linux, Solaris had no serious advantage anymore despite being a quality product. It really is a different story now, though. There's room for more diversity, though they'd probably have to have made the switch to Linux. Open sourcing Solaris earlier on before Linux ate the whole market -- or embracing Linux, or taking some hybrid approach, could maybe have kept them relevant.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Many would state that even today there are quite a few features that Solaris does much better than Linux, but so is "progress".

ben1040 5y ago

>Sun, with Java, which hides SPARC vs x86 could have made the entire cloud happen a decade earlier. All they had to do was live their trademark tagline, "the network is the computer." Which I learned today was abandoned by Sun or Oracle and was adopted and re-registered as a trademark by Cloudflare in 2019.

pjmlp 5y ago
They did, from SUN RPC, they moved into Distributed Objects Everywhere with Objective-C/OpenSTEP, which then gave birth to RMI and J2EE. Containers are basically Java application servers, rebooted as language agnostic OS services.

CalChris 5y ago

I don't know that SPARC was such a performance loser to x86 so much as Intel simply having a commanding lead in process technology at the time. Even Apple capitulated. That lead gave them a market domination that allowed them to reinvest (think Amazon) in their own fabs. x86 was a dog that Intel spent $1B/yr on improving so that your code ran fast. They took that strategy to the bank for as long as they could which was at least a decade longer than anyone thought they could. As I think you're pointing out, Java wasn't a pivot. It was rather an excuse not to pivot. Sun really needed a Gates style pivot with Internet Explorer or a Bezos style pivot with his services manifesto. Instead you got a ponytail. Also, before missing the cloud, Sun missed routers. Still, they were a pretty successful failure. We should all fail so well.

titzer 5y ago
Oh, it was totally. Sun lost at least two generations of microarchitectures to mismanagement. They resisted doing out-of-order execution far too long and they just could never keep up with single-core performance. Even process technology would not have been able to rescue the comparatively sophomoric micro-architecture. Intel and AMD and IBM just totally outclassed them.
Melkman 5y ago
Sun didn't miss routers... The part of Stanford University Network that went to do routers used an other name: Cisco.
hapless 5y ago
SPARC rapidly became a performance loser to x86. And, at the time, Intel had no process advantage. None at all. Intel Pentium II was almost exactly 100% as fast as UltraSPARC IIi, on the same process (350 nm), at about 1/20th the cost. That was the last competitive Sun SPARC product, after that they were all brutally slow. The less said about US III and US IV, the better. By the time that Sun put itself on the auction block, their internal CPUs weren't even good enough for legacy customers. They were obliged to start re-selling Fujitsu SPARC products just to keep SPARC loyalists inside the tent.
- 5y ago