One thing I've learned over the years is how sales people are rewarded is important to the products a company decides to sell. It actually drives the product m

One thing I've learned over the years is how sales people are rewarded is important to the products a company decides to sell. It actually drives the product mix and constrains their choices about new markets or new approaches. Enterprise companies reward sales people on commission on large deals structured across hardware, software, support and services. Those companies are allergic to "retail" opportunities. It suspect it would have been impossible for Sun to sell affordable computers individually or in low quantities because no sales person would have been compensated. Most people wonder why "great technology" dies at the hands of corporate overlords. I don't. I look at where the incentives lie and if they lie on big deals in an industry that's becoming commoditized, that company is likely toast. Why doesn't the business change to accommodate lower cost, commodity systems or servers? Even in the late 1990's the writing was on the wall. For years as SGI came out with more $40,000+ workstations competing with $10,000 high end x86? Why did Sun push our company in 2000/2001 to buy (relatively mediocre) preforming SPARC $75,000 servers when the industry was clearly moving to commodity x86/64 at $20,000? The high prices lead to bigger deals and more commission. I was briefly the beneficiary of the Sun startup program and we bought some Sun x86 hardware at reduced rates. Without that program, I would not have been able to afford what was well designed and good quality hardware. I would simply have gone for DELL x86. I was also a Sun reseller for a while, and it was always about the packaged deal. The sales people have an incredible amount of sway. After all, with no money coming in, you don't last long. (For normal companies - zero revenue unicorns make no sense to me). They will actively undermine any effort to change the situation. They will ridicule and belittle the new technology. But they're sales people and not technologists or developers. It's like watching the dinosaurs make fun of the asteroid. (What a big, dumb rock!) They would rather have yet another bad sales quarter in an endless string of bad sales quarters than attack their compensation. It's especially fun when it's the end of the quarter and you finally get the call from a sales rep. They're desperate to meet their quota so they'll make a deal on your pathetically small order. They idea that a customer could get on a website and just buy the product at a reasonable cost without having to have a sales meeting to upsell them on another batch services, is incomprehensible to them. Had Sun bought Apple? It would have been some vaporware product announcements until they realized their sales people weren't interested, sold off any assets of value, and shoved the rest of it in a warehouse as IP. They would go back to trying to hold the line against pesky cheap PCs (which aren't real workstations) and x86 servers (which aren't real servers).