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Yes. Sun became all about extracting rents from vendor lock-in (SPARC, J2ME, SUN DS, etc.). But Sun couldn't maintain that vendor lock-in, so Sun went under.
by cryptonector 3y ago
Yes. Sun became all about extracting rents from vendor lock-in (SPARC, J2ME, SUN DS, etc.). But Sun couldn't maintain that vendor lock-in, so Sun went under. Management just did not or would not see this, much less act on it. OpenSolaris was a good initiative for rebuilding mind-share, but it was a bit too little too late.
But the biggest mistakes Sun made were made in 2002-2004, and they never recovered:
- the Solaris on x86 "cancellation" (it
was more putting it on hold, maybe, but
the market took it as a cancellation)
- not making a deal with Google for Google
to use Solaris in their data centers
- killing off Sun PS (professions services)
The Solaris on x86 "cancellation" killed a lot of mind-share. No one wanted to get locked-in to SPARC.
Making a deal with Google would have reinvigorated Solaris' mind-share at a critical time.
IBM did the opposite of killing off its professional services division. IBM killed off their x86 systems division and beefed up its PS, and IBM went on to make a killing on PS.
The vendor lock-in issues totally compounded these terrible decisions.
After 2002 Sun was always on the back foot.
- znpy 3y ago> not making a deal with Google for Google to use Solaris in their data centers Wow i had no idea that had almost happened! Anyone care to elaborate further on that? I wonder what could have been, if later solaris was open sourced and google could push their improvements… maybe we’d all be running containers based on solaris zones, and would have solaris on our smartphones? Who knows!
- cryptonector 3y agoThe story as I understand it is that Sun wanted to license Solaris on a number of hosts basis while Google considered the number of servers they had to be a critical secret. > maybe we’d all be running containers based on solaris zones There were a lot of nice things about Solaris. The Solaris engineering org was amazing, full of visionary giants. ZFS, Zones, DTrace, mdb, SMF (systemd, but done better and ten years earlier), the fault tolerance stuff -- all created by engineers as skunkworks.
- fishnchips 3y agoFun fact - some Google servers ran Solaris. I worked on the tape backup team and the machines connected to LTE drives were indeed running Solaris.