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Wow, this is good analysis and very prescient. I don't necessarily condemn this as a strategy, if you can afford it - there's always a chance of an interesting

Wow, this is good analysis and very prescient. I don't necessarily condemn this as a strategy, if you can afford it - there's always a chance of an interesting pivot. The problem is when people know your company doesn't commit to products long-term and don't care if people love them (cough Reader cough), it starts to affect their interest in engaging and committing their time. /xoogler

seanhunter 4y ago
I disagree. This is terrible analysis: it's wrong about Sun and it's wrong about Stadia. Sunray failed not because people didn't want utility computing. They clearly do - utility computing kiosks are absolutely everywhere. Sunray failed because the Sunos/solaris userspace wasn't adequate to provide a utility computing experience people wanted. In fact it was total garbage. You can see it there in the screenshots. CDE, a desktop only a mother could love. No applications worth a damn except Lotus. I worked as a contractor at a large bank and when Novell refused to say that Lotus 123 was y2k compliant they ripped out 2 sun workstations from every trader's desktop and replaced them with windows boxes. They literally had a skip/dumpster outside the building where you could go pick up sun hardware they had chucked out. The only good userspace tooling on Solaris around 1998 was for developers and even there the sun workshop debugger was pretty sketchy[1]. I speak as someone who owned a Spark 5 at home and had solaris workstations on my desk at multiple jobs. I really wanted to love Sun and kind of did love Sun hardware, but their userspace was always severely lacking. Likewise Stadia didn't fail because people don't want cloud gaming. The success of Nvidia GForce Now and Nintendo's new stream-things-to-switch architecture for several new games proves that[2]. Logitech is also about to come out with a cloud-based mobile gaming device (although that may struggle to compete with Steam Deck which is a device you own for about the same price point). Stadia failed because Google completely failed to look at competitive offerings like GamePass and offer something compelling as an alternative. Instead they did a full-price cash grab on the games and just said "trust us" to keep the service running (which everyone knew they would not honour and they did not honour). [1] This debugger has the unique distinction of being the only debugger to ever core dump on me when I was trying to load the core dump of the program I was trying to debug. [2] https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce-now/
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  Agree, huge demand for virtual desktops and centralised management overall... just not running Solaris. Altho hn'ers are not very exposed to it, many large enterprises run with thousands of users on "virtual desktop farms", like, this is huge part of citrix / vmware business model.
mike_hearn 4y ago
You could argue that the SunRay vision is what Eric Schmidt spent the next decade years or so implementing at Google and what Amazon did with AWS, just with browsers replacing SunRay hardware, racks of AMD/Intel boxes replacing the SPARC hardware, and with passwords/phone apps instead of the smartcards. The vision wasn't necessarily all that wrong, just the approach wasn't incremental enough. Also - it was a very different and opposite approach to what Java was doing at the time. Java didn't have any notion of UI streaming like NeWS. It ran UI locally, always. So it's pretty unclear how much Sun really bought into the SunRay vision. They certainly didn't align everything around it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

seanhunter 4y ago

I disagree. This is terrible analysis: it's wrong about Sun and it's wrong about Stadia. Sunray failed not because people didn't want utility computing. They clearly do - utility computing kiosks are absolutely everywhere. Sunray failed because the Sunos/solaris userspace wasn't adequate to provide a utility computing experience people wanted. In fact it was total garbage. You can see it there in the screenshots. CDE, a desktop only a mother could love. No applications worth a damn except Lotus. I worked as a contractor at a large bank and when Novell refused to say that Lotus 123 was y2k compliant they ripped out 2 sun workstations from every trader's desktop and replaced them with windows boxes. They literally had a skip/dumpster outside the building where you could go pick up sun hardware they had chucked out. The only good userspace tooling on Solaris around 1998 was for developers and even there the sun workshop debugger was pretty sketchy[1]. I speak as someone who owned a Spark 5 at home and had solaris workstations on my desk at multiple jobs. I really wanted to love Sun and kind of did love Sun hardware, but their userspace was always severely lacking. Likewise Stadia didn't fail because people don't want cloud gaming. The success of Nvidia GForce Now and Nintendo's new stream-things-to-switch architecture for several new games proves that[2]. Logitech is also about to come out with a cloud-based mobile gaming device (although that may struggle to compete with Steam Deck which is a device you own for about the same price point). Stadia failed because Google completely failed to look at competitive offerings like GamePass and offer something compelling as an alternative. Instead they did a full-price cash grab on the games and just said "trust us" to keep the service running (which everyone knew they would not honour and they did not honour). [1] This debugger has the unique distinction of being the only debugger to ever core dump on me when I was trying to load the core dump of the program I was trying to debug. [2] https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce-now/

xyzzy123 4y ago
Agree, huge demand for virtual desktops and centralised management overall... just not running Solaris. Altho hn'ers are not very exposed to it, many large enterprises run with thousands of users on "virtual desktop farms", like, this is huge part of citrix / vmware business model.

mike_hearn 4y ago

You could argue that the SunRay vision is what Eric Schmidt spent the next decade years or so implementing at Google and what Amazon did with AWS, just with browsers replacing SunRay hardware, racks of AMD/Intel boxes replacing the SPARC hardware, and with passwords/phone apps instead of the smartcards. The vision wasn't necessarily all that wrong, just the approach wasn't incremental enough. Also - it was a very different and opposite approach to what Java was doing at the time. Java didn't have any notion of UI streaming like NeWS. It ran UI locally, always. So it's pretty unclear how much Sun really bought into the SunRay vision. They certainly didn't align everything around it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]