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I worked for Sun in the early 1990s when they were widely seen as an unstoppable force. It was wild. Even around 2000, I felt as if they were leading the Web in
by jasoneckert 4y ago
I worked for Sun in the early 1990s when they were widely seen as an unstoppable force. It was wild. Even around 2000, I felt as if they were leading the Web into the future.
But after the dot com bubble burst, it was sad to see how quickly they declined and how Solaris and SPARC faded into obscurity.
I still have a lot of old Sun machines in my basement as a reminder of those amazing times. I can't get rid of them, because as Marie Kondo points out, they still SPARC joy ;-)
- hinkley 4y agoI worked at a company in about 2002-5 that was selling software to mobile phone carriers. They were still exclusively Sun hardware. And that was probably the last time I used Sun hardware. I have no recollection of why McNealy left, but I’m not sure Schwartz was the right person for the job. He did some good work for forwarding the case for FOSS, but it always seemed to come at the expense of Sun.
- sangnoir 4y agoI don't see how Sun's could have successfully navigated the Linux on commodity x86 onslaught without becoming a services company. Google and Facebook would have been huge Sun customers pre-dotcom-bust, before Linux/x86 got a solid foothold. Both server hardware and software got commoditized, leaving Sun no complement to monetize.
- rbanffy 4y ago> I don't see how Sun's could have successfully navigated the Linux on commodity x86 Sorry for necromancing your comment, but we only need to look at Apple - they make RISC-based Unix workstations today. For servers it's always been a game of either providing something others can't have (think IBM mainframes and POWER systems) or competing in price with razor-thin margins. When Sun started making x86 boxes, I knew it was game over.