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When I was in college in the mid 1990's Sun was the dominate Unix workstation company. We had a couple of thousand on campus. Then I started working in the se

When I was in college in the mid 1990's Sun was the dominate Unix workstation company. We had a couple of thousand on campus. Then I started working in the semiconductor industry in 1997 and every had a Sun SPARCstation or Ultra 1/2 on their desk. We had some big 16 CPU E4000/5000 class machines in the server room. All of the EDA / CAD chip design software ran on Unix and some companies started porting to Linux/x86. Some of our jobs used >4GB RAM so we required a 64-bit machine. AMD released their Opteron 64-bit in 2003 and we got a couple right after our tools were ported to 64-bit Linux. We never bought another Sun after that.

jandrese 5y ago
Sun ultimately suffered the same fate of all of the Unix workstation companies. By selling only expensive "Serious Business" hardware to corporations they were able to keep the per-unit margins high, but were completely crushed by commodity PCs in volume and ultimately total profit. Ultimately those huge commodity sales volumes were turned into big R&D budgets that allowed them to produce faster and more efficient hardware than the big workstations providers. And then the one advantage they had: the OS, was undercut by BSD and Linux. So a company has the option of spending 5 or 6 figures on a big Unix box with a 4 figure yearly support contract and pain in the ass license management, or they could spend a low 4 figures on a PC running Linux that is just as good or better in all the ways that matter and doesn't have annoying salesguys to deal with or recurring costs.
- silverlake 5y ago
  Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, spoke at my biz school ~2000. Someone asked about the competitive threat of Dell + Linux. He ranted for a long time about Dell being junk and SunOS vastly better than Linux. Everyone after felt Sun was doomed. They crashed a few years later. It was a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma case.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > By selling only expensive "Serious Business" hardware to corporations This is a mistake IBM is making as well. There is no cheap on-ramp for their POWER and mainframe platforms. I doubt those machines are running many new workloads. Almost all new corporate software is developed for Linux-based commodity servers. It's a shame, really, because they are magnificent machines.

jandrese 5y ago

Sun ultimately suffered the same fate of all of the Unix workstation companies. By selling only expensive "Serious Business" hardware to corporations they were able to keep the per-unit margins high, but were completely crushed by commodity PCs in volume and ultimately total profit. Ultimately those huge commodity sales volumes were turned into big R&D budgets that allowed them to produce faster and more efficient hardware than the big workstations providers. And then the one advantage they had: the OS, was undercut by BSD and Linux. So a company has the option of spending 5 or 6 figures on a big Unix box with a 4 figure yearly support contract and pain in the ass license management, or they could spend a low 4 figures on a PC running Linux that is just as good or better in all the ways that matter and doesn't have annoying salesguys to deal with or recurring costs.

silverlake 5y ago
Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, spoke at my biz school ~2000. Someone asked about the competitive threat of Dell + Linux. He ranted for a long time about Dell being junk and SunOS vastly better than Linux. Everyone after felt Sun was doomed. They crashed a few years later. It was a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma case.
rbanffy 5y ago
> By selling only expensive "Serious Business" hardware to corporations This is a mistake IBM is making as well. There is no cheap on-ramp for their POWER and mainframe platforms. I doubt those machines are running many new workloads. Almost all new corporate software is developed for Linux-based commodity servers. It's a shame, really, because they are magnificent machines.