5 ms·

What Sun got wrong

386 points by chmaynard 11d ago

cmiller1 11d ago
How timely, I was just thinking about Sun after doing some office rearranging last week and running into a bunch of sun branded ethernet cables.
coreyh14444 11d ago
As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.
- sschueller 11d ago
  For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates. Instead I can for example go to Thomas Kren and configure my serves online for a fraction of the cost. They have what they list in stock, delivered a few weeks later. Everything is clear and hasle free. At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
  - bombcar 11d ago
    That’s exactly what enterprise sales is. Call for pricing, tell the absolute upper limit you can spend, and pay.
    - ako 11d ago
      A nicer way to frame it is: “value based pricing”.
    - fragmede 11d ago
      hire a salesperson to give them fake sales numbers and low ball them so you pay less?
  - thevillagechief 11d ago
    I think this is a case of AI ruining the hardware market. We used to almost exclusively use Dell, but now we've been forced to look elsewhere and go through validating new vendors. The lead-times are ridiculous, and these guys now only pay attention to the really big guys. Not sure I can blame them though, you've gotta do what's best for your business.
    - ganoushoreilly 11d ago
      Dell was very much moving this way before modern AI explosion. The inconsistency on pricing alone depending on what rep was helping you also became a problem. I could often times call in direct and order via business line cheaper than dealing with my account rep. No reason to jump through so many hoops. I prefer the "This is the price" model and just make it consistent. I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general. Just let me buy it and move on.
      - dabraham1248 11d ago
        > I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general. Based on how things are moving, I think it's more likely that AI will _replace_ the layers of middle men (with layers of "middle AI"), then that those layers will be _removed_.
        warkdarrior 11d ago
        Of course, the process (of squeezing the customer) is the point. The implementation of that process, with either human account reps or sales bots, is irrelevant.
        fragmede 11d ago
        Not to the account reps who's pay put food on their table, vs the bots who don't have children to feed.
      - fooker 11d ago
  - dylan604 11d ago
    > At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate. This is precisely the role of the sales person for something like a service, but for a physical product it is pretty egregious. There is no greater sin than leaving money on the table. There's an old story about someone offering a quote that was apparently pretty low based on reaction, so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher.
    - hosteur 11d ago
      > so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher I don’t understand what this means? I understand that they bumped the price. But I du not understand what is meant by it being for the assistant? Care to explain?
      - Huppie 11d ago
        Not OP but the way I read it... Electrician: "Okay, so my services start at $100/hr" <nobody bats an eye> Electrician: "... for when my assistant can handle things." Replace Electrician by whatever skilled professional you prefer.
        dylan604 11d ago
        Pretty much, except the assistant is never going to handle things and the updated fees go up to include you and the assistant. If you only ever send out your assistant, you never make money
    - yellowstuff 11d ago
      I like this version: The optician quotes the price of new glasses by saying "$100", waits to see if the customer flinches, "... for the lenses", waits again, "... each.".
    - marssaxman 11d ago
      I wonder how effective it really is, over the long term, to generate short-term profit by consuming trust like this.
  - PaulHoule 11d ago
    The iron law is that vendors want to become like the old Sun. The only reason they don't is if they are trying to compete their way up the hill. Take away the old Sun and SGI and IBM and now Dell is Sun.
    - cherryteastain 11d ago
      Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps. All that Dell does is assembling standard, commoditized parts and putting a free OS on it. Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate, while Sun's business is extremely hard to replicate. Of course, Sun's competitive advantage turned into a curse when the components of that vertical integration become uncompetitive both features and price wise vs. the GNU/Linux-on-Intel stack. But regardless, Dell could never replicate the vertical integration Sun had.
      - PaulHoule 11d ago
        Really? When I first met Sun machines they were selling 68k-based Sun machines that were better specced than Apple and Amiga and such but left them dependent on Motorola’s architecture that had indirect address and thus no future. Sure they had an in house chip development ARM team right at the time when RISC economics looked good but CPU architecture had to work harder and harder to beat the memory wall and SPARC was not competitive by 2005 and “Hail Mary” projects like CoolThreads were difficult and expensive but did not deliver for customers. Hypothetically customers could benefit from that proprietary stuff but they benefit even more from rapid progress is competitive, commodity markets. When I was working at the library circa 2005 we were thinking about replacing all the Windows computers that patrons used to access the online catalog (and other services) with a web browser with Sun Rays, we probably would have bought a few hundred of them and we would have bought some SPARC servers to back them up. We could have gotten Netscape to run under Solaris but after a week of effort I wasn't able to get Mozilla to build, so no modern web browser. So no Sun Rays. No servers. DTrace and ZFS were great innovations but without the magic of "can run the software you need to run" they are just Blub. Had Sun done the work to get Mozilla running on their machines and forgotten about DTrace and ZFS people might still be using Solaris... but instead DTrace and ZFS found an audience by supporting... the commodity OS! (arguably at that time supporting a web browser was the #1, #2 and all the way through #99 task that the Solaris team should have been working on at that time and everything else from Java to Tcl to ZFS was a dangerous distraction... and that's how companies in a position like Sun die)
  - RajT88 11d ago
    > At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you This is how license compliance shakedowns work. Make sure your DRM is more flexible than theicensing terms, find an overage and see what you can get the customer to agree to. I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.
  - inanutshellus 11d ago
    DELL was an innovator in this "incomparable pricing" model for normal consumers. You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200. IIRC they won business awards for this. Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?
  - walrus01 11d ago
    > For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates. I think this would be expected from a company that has acquired and absorbed EMC and Perot.
- jmclnx 11d ago
  And that is the "thing". Every failed mini company had the same exact issue, seems customers had to beg and/or go through hell to purchase equipment. Never mind that the hardware was more expensive than what you cold buy from companies like Dell. IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
  - bch 11d ago
    And Redhat[0], and professional services a la Accenture[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#2010s%E2%80%93present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#2010s%E2%80%93present [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
    - esseph 11d ago
      Their old services arm was Kyndryl which they spun out as its own thing
  - esseph 11d ago
    > IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business. Imagine every bank you know going through tech modernization and maybe 70% of those are now using Red Hat OpenShift. They own Red Hat (OpenShift kubernetes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform) AND HashiCorp (Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Packer, Vault, etc.) now, on top of their previous mainframe, services gigs, global financing arm, and calling everything they sell "watson".
  - jhallenworld 11d ago
    I seem to remember IBM had a way to buy their stuff online, but not anymore apparently. I'm sure this was back in the System x days.
- fidotron 11d ago
  Sun commercial sales reps, at least in Europe, were astoundingly slimy. I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed. So when we could move to Dell we did.
  - arethuza 11d ago
    I'm sure I have a memory of someone at Sun UK telling me about how they managed to run up a £30K bar bill at an event....
    - fidotron 11d ago
      Yeah that fits. I was in London (though not the City) and it was definitely that sort of scene. Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards. What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.
  - roryirvine 11d ago
    Yeah, and it wasn't just the "call for pricing" game, it was having to deal with monthly "touching base" calls which were mostly an opportunity to push corporate hospitality and other not-quite-inducements. Whereas Dell just gave us a flat 30% discount on list pricing, and were clear in advance about what level of annual spend would trigger an increase to 35%. We'd order online and our sales rep would phone a few hours later to confirm. Other than that, they'd initiate contact maybe once a year when Dell refreshed their server or storage product lines and would offer to either send some bumpf or arrange for some demo kit. Dealing with them was so much less hassle all round, you never got covered in slime, and you never felt like they were on the verge of offering you bribes.
- nunez 11d ago
  Yeah, and then Dell more-or-less turned into that. Companies get big, customers and sales get more complicated, process gets more calcified. SUNW would probably still be around if the whole x86 commodity pizza box revolution hadn't happened OR if they had pivoted away from SPARC earlier and went heavily into x86. Example: buying from IBM doesn't sound too different from buying from Sun, but they're still around because mainframes will be around until the Earth implodes (probably). (I think that their channel/partner programs along with their professional services org are big reasons why Dell is still a key player in the datacenter space. You can buy Dell direct, and the sales process is still "good" as far as enterprise sales goes, but bigger players usually get their Dell kit through distributors/vendors with Dell professional services handling architecture, build-out, enablement, etc. I'm not sure how much energy SUNW invested in this, as they were before my time, but this combo is a major revenue driver for them.)
  - pjmlp 11d ago
    Also thanks to virtualization being originally invented in mainframes, and the OS design done by IBM (and Unisys as well), they get to run the old workloads on modern hardware, and also support various UNIX flavours. You can even run most cool Python, Go, Java, Rust, PHP among others, on systems like z/OS.
  - cyberpunk 11d ago
    We have a couple mainframes at work, had an incident last year when someone forgot to apply a new license to one. p1, no payments happening. I was kinda stunned; there’s a level of balls involved in selling an x millions machine and having it fail closed that I’m sort of impressed by but also utterly appalled they’d treat their big customers like that.. I mean surely to fuck it could have been an automated reminder email to the mothership and not just: sorry folks no banking for you today.
- AdamN 11d ago
  Yeah it was so much more accessible to play around with configs and pricing and then all you needed was a credit card. Even now I think enterprise companies should be more open about what's possible and what the price and delivery date would be without having to talk/chat/email anybody. Even for something like a Juniper $100k+ device it would be kind of cool to configure it.
- proxysna 11d ago
  I’ve had that experience with dell consistently over the last 6+ years. While with other vendors I can do everything over email from start to finish, Dell insists on meetings, follow-ups on topics that I said I am not interested in talking about, services that I do not need, meetings with teams I am not interested in meeting, reps that straight up skip meetings, so I have to console a junior rep that got stuck in a meeting that is above their pay grade. Different reps same slimy bs.
- jimt1234 11d ago
  I needed to add a bunch of capacity running Sun/Solaris back in the late-90s. Same thing: pointless meetings with sales reps without clarity in pricing. Finally, I found the gear we were looking for on eBay, bought it, drove over and picked it up in my Ford Explorer, and had it up-and-running in one day. To my surprise, people in my company were PO'ed. But I had air cover because the CEO found out and loved it.
- walrus01 11d ago
  > Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware. Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors. As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house". At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.
  - kev009 11d ago
    It's easier to see in hindsight but servers have eaten a lot of macro economic headwinds. 1999 and 2002 correspond roughly to telecom and dotcom bubbles popping. So open source operating systems were also pulled up into these positions through a lot of work and by the early 2000s it was kind of obvious this was the way forward. 2008 financial crisis really knocked the high end (RISC/UNIX/Itanium) and started the long migration to renting vs owning. In hindsight it's remarkable how much money used to just be there in the economy of all this. But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.
    - walrus01 11d ago
      > But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is. It's not like there's less servers being sold, they're just bespoke designs from companies like the big Taiwanese ODMs that go straight into hyperscaler facilities, and we don't get to see public marketing websites and product info about them. The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.
- dmitrygr 11d ago
  On the other hand, Sun and DEC hardware from then still works today, if you care to power it on. How many dell devices do?
- schmichael 11d ago
  If you click through to the anecdote[0] mentioned in the article, the problem was not with having to contact a sales rep. In fact the startup wanted a sales rep. Sun specifically asked them to use the website: > More than once though, the Sun people did suggest I just buy the servers off the web site. Dell was just the only one to callback. I don't doubt your experience but that was at the height of Sun's business, not it's nadir as this article is about. [0] - https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-me/ https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...
- Tangurena2 11d ago
  One of the first "expert systems" was one that helped you spec your DEC computer. It was easy to order a VAX that was missing necessary hardware (or had incompatible hardware). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon
cmdrk 11d ago
when I was a student in the waning days of Sun, the SPARC/Solaris machines were impenetrable Big Iron guarded closely by the greybeards -- not to be touched by the likes of mere undergrads. Never really did get beyond noodling around with cast off gear from eBay, though I did get to enjoy a bit of it via the Sun DNA in SmartOS years later.
- PaulHoule 11d ago
  Our Sun rep served us well at an academic library. I had no problems provisioning a server with a nice storage array. When things fell apart at Sun our sales engineer from Sun wound up working for us.
- dizhn 11d ago
  I did get to sit in front of the consoles that served the whole school (via telnet) and even hard rebooted them a few times and I wasn't even in a techy major. Just had good relations with the head of school IT. That much exposure was enough to crave a similar computing experience and that's when I installed Linux at home right after college.
strappymcneeler 11d ago
Solaris lack of a package manager and crappy patches where patches replaced things wholesale, caused us a lot of overtime, but hey, got me a bigger house! Thanks Sun! Oh btw their hardware was way ahead of their shit software, which wasn’t as bad as shittier IBM or Digital or HP
- dijit 11d ago
  I still feel like we're catching up to SMF. But yeah, the lack of package manager hurt a lot, and there were competing third-party package managers which had totally different pro's/con's and packages and were incompatible with each other... what a mess. Compared to apt/yum it was kinda comical... but the first party software really was excellent otherwise.
- jacquesm 11d ago
  Yes. The software really wasn't all that great. I played a lot with Sun gear and had SGI stuff as well, the polish of the SGI machines vs the 1980's vibe that the Sun gear gave off was on a completely different level. Sun was quality hardware but the software was really a time capsule of what Unix workstations had looked like in the past.
- rwmj 11d ago
  Not to mention the horrible installer. At that time, Debian and Red Hat installs were super-easy compared to Solaris. And Sun controlled their own hardware stack too!
justin66 11d ago
Having read a lot of these things from ex-Sun employees, I dearly want to read one with the topic my department is the one that fucked up Sun. I don't think I have seen a topic like that yet.
- bcantrill 11d ago
  I actually haven't read a ton of these, so would love to be pointed to what you have found. But yes, everyone will be biased, and I am too. I think that the organization that I was in fucked up plenty (when I joined the company in 1996, SunSoft was led by truly one of the most incompetent executives I have ever encountered, a bumbling oaf that Sun kept putting in charge of different business units, letting him asphyxiate them one by one), but the fact that everyone also sees something else wrong probably tells you a few things: everyone at Sun earnestly wanted the company to succeed; Sun did a bunch of stuff right; Sun did a bunch of other stuff wrong. Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome -- and I think it's pretty telling that Sun's executive leadership basically went on to do more or less nothing after Sun. I loved Sun -- but it was a breeding ground for engineers, not executive leadership.
  - justin66 11d ago
    I'm reluctant to call anyone out. I liked Sun a lot, as well as the people I've encountered who worked there. There was a thread between a couple of ex-Sun guys here on hn years ago - I can't find it right now - which made me feel there was a humorous and very human pattern in Sun postmortem comments: "man, that other team really killed Sun, we were doomed after that thing they did." I was pretty curious what the people on that other team (the SPARC microprocessor designers, in the case of that comment thread) might have said in their own defense, where they might have spread some of the blame, and so on. (perhaps it doesn't do your rather full blog post justice to compare it to something considerably less complete like a comment thread) > Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome I emphatically agree. Maybe it goes without saying but with Sun, multiple generations of leadership, I think.
- jhbadger 11d ago
grahamlee 11d ago
The Sun model of beefy server, ultra-thin client worked incredibly well and presaged the widespread adoption of virtualisation that eventually led to cloud computing and containerised software. Unfortunately that model made it very easy to undercut their prices using commodity hardware; I managed a Solaris/Sun Ray network c.2004 and it was cheaper to switch to Linux/Intel and buy spare hardware to keep in a cupboard “just in case” than to keep the Sun network going through its support contract.
- dijit 11d ago
  it is often cheaper to buy a spare of something and throw it in a cupboard rather than have a support contract. I have a bunch of Aruba switches and this is what we do, because it's a lot cheaper.
  - bluGill 11d ago
    If you are only buying a single spare that is the case. Support contracts make sense when you would want several dozen spares.
    - dijit 11d ago
      if a support contract is 70% of the cost of something, then for every 2 of something a spare is cheaper. For Aruba I think it was 1:1; a support contract was the same price as the device itself over 2 years or something. Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices, so your cost scales with the amount you have... so I'm not sure I follow what you're saying.. Unless you mean to imply that you're replacing units more than once every 2 years, in which case of course you're right... but then I might consider going with another vendor entirely because that is a pretty terrible reliability record.
      - bluGill 11d ago
        There are lots of different support contracts. Some of them really do cover the entire site. You seem to not realize the scale of a large data center. If every device lasts 5 years you are replacing 10 per day is not unheard of.
ChrisArchitect 11d ago
Love that t-shirt. Does it have the Meta logo on the back of it? /s
titzer 11d ago
I interned for Sun and then worked as an MTS in Sun Labs for a couple of years. I miss Sun; I think they were very much an engineer's company that was spoiled by two things: big success in the early workstation market, and the dumb luck of the dot com boom. Sun hardware was solid (even though they fell behind the curve because of mismanagement of a couple of CPU lines), and its kernel (Solaris) was one of the well-engineered kernels ever. While any business makes some bad business decisions from time to time, one thing that was fatal was a crippling enterprise focus that failed to understand the huge growth opportunity that OSS and Linux represented. It was growth in a direction they not only didn't understand, but refused to understand, study, or adapt to. Sun's heyday was in the boom. The fish were jumping in the boat. So naturally they were building bigger and bigger boats. There was always the one-off ideas that might have gone here or there, but that core server cow just seemed like an endless source of cash. Thus they neglected the workstation market and ironically, the market for anything bigger than one single server rack. They didn't understand horizontal scaling, and the rise of cheap-but-replaceable consumer hardware like how Google did things was alien to them. They poo-poo'ed Linux, they killed and then unkilled Solaris x86, and a number of other things. I do miss Sun though. As far as engineering goes, they were a very serious company full of serious engineers. Basically the polar opposite of 10X tech bros and startup culture.
- bcantrill 11d ago
  Oof, the killing and subsequent unkilling of Solaris x86 in 2002 brings back very bad memories -- Sun management at its worst. It also highlighted the relative power of Sun's engineering in that everyone in Solaris knew it was the wrong decision, and we more or less disobeyed orders: during that period (January 2002 to August 2002, when it was reversed), we didn't change our treatment of x86. (And in particular, breaking x86 was grounds for a putback to be backed out.) When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.
- lokar 11d ago
  I worked at sun (sunsoft) right out of school near the peak. It was great. I was very excited to have all of the sources for sunos easily available to read. Later, in grad school I went to work at a startup… google. For me it recaptured everything I liked about Sun. And had the same CEO.
flanked-evergl 11d ago
Solaris was worse than Linux, and SPARC was worse than Intel. A lot worse. Even ZFS was way better integrated with the Linux kernel even while Solaris was supposedly maintained.
- whobre 11d ago
  Eh, depends when. In 2005, sure. Not so much in the 1990s
  - icedchai 11d ago
    Yep. Solaris was the Unix for the 90's. I worked at a couple of early ISPs and users demanded Sun Solaris shell servers. At a couple of startups, we built everything on Solaris because Linux wasn't accepted in the enterprise yet. By the early 2000's, 1) Linux was solid, why bother with Solaris? 2) ebay and other channels were flooded with used Sun hardware from failed dot-com companies anyway. No need to buy new.
  - rwmj 11d ago
    I was asked to benchmark some Solaris/SPARC vs Linux/Intel hardware in around 1997, and the price-performance of the Linux gear was easily 3+ times better. There wasn't really any comparison, especially when you consider how you could buy white box PCs from a local shop, grab a Red Hat ISO for nothing, and have an installed Linux server in 24 hours, compared to weeks to get something more expensive and worse for the Sun option. Even if Sun had been more reliable, it wouldn't have mattered because you could buy 3x the PCs and keep two in a cupboard, or more likely just replace everything with more numerous and better performing Linux PCs which was what we did.
    - pjmlp 11d ago
      Assuming that the PC was actually supported. I had to survive with 800x600 on a 1024x768 monitor for quite some time.
- pjmlp 11d ago
  Not in 2000, at my employer back then, our Linux server was only good as MP3 storage exposed via Samba/NFS. All development and production deployments was being done across Solaris, Aix and HP-UX in regards to UNIX flavours.
ImJasonH 11d ago
> all of these homage shirts are amazing You can't just say that without sharing those too!
- RationPhantoms 11d ago
  Brian, I know you lurk and post here but i'd love to see those designs make their way to the store so the general public can purchase them.
  - bcantrill 11d ago
    Heh, yeah, we're hearing that a lot. We'll find a way of getting these out to people, but we're still debating the best way to do that (running an online store isn't zero work -- but it's also not an unsolved problem!). Stay tuned!
    - rachr 11d ago
      Awesome. I'm not in a position at my company to move the needle much in terms of buying, but I would love to support you guys any way I can.
Zigurd 11d ago
Making workstations even in the dominant market position that Sun had, was a cottage industry compared to technology today, and it was managed that way. I wouldn't blame management for Sun being irrelevant now. What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. Not even Xerox. I've used aa Xerox Alto, a Sun workstation, an LMI CADR, and a Symbolics 3600, and none of them were as carefully crafted as a Macintosh with a tiny memory and a floppy disk. Next inherited this ethic. Jobs valued the person using the machine more than anything else about the machine.
- arethuza 11d ago
  My personal favourite UI was HyperNeWS built on Sun's NeWS. Edit: Writing PostScript and having no discernible security probably didn't make NeWS a great fit for the world of the Internet - but it was a lot of fun.
- TacticalCoder 11d ago
  > What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times. Sun, just like SGI, got attacked by cheap beige PCs running either Windows or Linux. I don't think their UI had much to do with their downfall and, arguably, SGI's UIs were better than the competition and they still disappeared too. Also weren't most machines sold by Sun servers anyway? Their famous "We the dot in .com" tagline.
  - AceJohnny2 11d ago
    Linux was free, and people will put up with a lot of shit for that.
    - SoftTalker 11d ago
      Exactly. Free vs. $8k (in 1990 dollars) for a NeXT computer was a pretty easy choice for most people.
ecshafer 11d ago
Part of my maturing as I've gotten older is realizing how much business success actually comes from Sales, BizzDev, Product, etc. Engineering is great, but if you don't have people actually getting things shipped, getting customers, and talking with customers, you will eventually fail. Sure sometimes some internet companies find a money printer and get around this, but I think they are the exceptions to the rule. Sun having great tech, but having a shit sales channel, is not going to lead to success. Dell, small or large, they are going to get you someone on the phone and sell you a server.
- kevin_nisbet 11d ago
  Part of my maturing with getting older in addition to the above is that luck is a larger factor than most people are willing to admit. So I'm with you that GTM is just as important as engineering, but execution on all fronts is what tilts the luck factor. And with luck you get exceptions which is why you can get companies that seem to succeed despite themselves.
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DonHopkins 11d ago
Speaking of another Steven, the Dell Dude: Things were going great at Dell until its wildly popular advertising campaign suddenly came tumbling down over an unfortunate indiscretion on the Lower East Side that surprised absolutely nobody... https://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/02/10/deli.dude.arrest/ https://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/02/10/deli.dude.arrest/ >'Dell Dude' arrested for marijuana possession >Monday, February 10, 2003 Posted: 3:55 PM EST (2055 GMT) >NEW YORK (CNN) -- Benjamin Curtis, better known as the "Dell Dude" from the computer company's television commercials, was arrested Sunday while he allegedly attempted to buy marijuana on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Steve The Dell Dude Commercial Compilation (DUDE WE'RE GETTING A DELL!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJxTHMygpDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJxTHMygpDY
- deleted 11d ago
  [deleted]
kens 11d ago
I worked at Sun from 1995 to 2004. My take is that Sun had major structural problems all along, but as long as money streamed in from the tech bubble, these issues could be ignored. When the tech bubble ended, it was too late to fix the problems. One big problem was that there was no cooperation inside Sun. Groups in Sun kind of viewed HP as a competitor, kind of viewed SGI as a competitor, but the real competitor to be destroyed was that other group in Sun. The leaders of the project I worked on spent most of their time in political battles, trying to acquire or outmaneuver the other teams working on similar projects. Another problem was that the main parts of Sun had conflicting strategies. The Solaris/SunSoft division wanted to run on SPARC, x86, and Power PC for the largest market. The SPARC division, of course, wanted none of that. The hardware division wanted to make expensive servers, but the other teams saw cheaper hardware as the right direction. The market ended up moving to cheap rack-mounted Linux x86 servers, so nobody at Sun won in the end.
- jeffbee 11d ago
  Right before they fell face-first into the grave, they did finally ship the v20z, which was a completely reasonable way to run Solaris x86. Its management board ran Linux on PowerPC, for irony purposes.
thegagne 11d ago
Since we're sharing, I have fond memories of my using my the Sun thin clients at university. They were slow to start up and use for the most part, but once you got to the terminal... it was great. Being a hacker-type, I did everything with it. Email? Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine. Want some html on my personal page? Use vi. I think they didn't take away my access for years after college, and I would sometimes login and poke around just for fun. I do blame them, along with the rise of Java and the awful gui toolkit motif for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I was so frustrated that our grades were dependent on learning something that I saw as completely worthless in light of the dotcom boom happening at the time. I wanted them to teach us web technologies, or at least some good system code, but all I got was broken x11 and awful performance.
- nailer 11d ago
  > I do blame them, along with the rise of Java ...for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I avoided studying CS for this reason: I saw my girlfriend's Java textbooks and thought if I had to appreciate this, I wasn't cut out to be a programmer, and stuck to network engineering. Years later, after 'Gang of Four' style OOP started dying, I have some code in a new things people use here everyday.
- not_a_bot_4sho 11d ago
  I appreciate this comment for reviving memories of pine and lynx and all of that
- forinti 11d ago
  I used a machine that had 8MB of RAM and a huge b&w monitor. One day I found out it would crash if your process forked more than 127 times. These things were so cool at the time but are nothing compared to a Raspberry Pi.
  - flyinghamster 11d ago
    It's absolutely crazy to realize that even a Pi 400 running from MicroSD would smoke classic workstations of yesteryear, and yet by today's standards it's slow.
whalesalad 11d ago
Where can one buy the Oxide t-shirt
gadders 11d ago
The good thing about Sun (when working at a corporate customer) was that they were very good at getting their distinguished tech people into give talks - Tim Bray, James Gosling etc.
labrador 11d ago
I sold my Sun stock at the internet bubble top for $70 a share. A few months later it was $7. I think of that when I see PE ratios in the hundreds for Tesla, SpaceX and other AI stocks.
- nradov 11d ago
  Good timing. But on the other hand if you had sold AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, ORCL, AVGO, ADI, KLAC, LRCX, etc at the Internet bubble top then you would have missed out on huge gains since then.
- metaphor 11d ago
  Scott McNealy had a few choice words in retrospect[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950311
traveltalk 11d ago
that right
nielsbot 11d ago
I worked there right before they sold to Oracle for a bit—my impression was a lot of brilliant engineers but no unified product story.
keeda 11d ago
I know OP has an intimately inside perspective, whereas what I know about Sun is only from what I read online as an admirer and developer on its platforms… but “gotten bored of the mechanics of running a business” does not match what seemed to be more about having gotten “too enterprise-y” or “too out of touch with the market” and maybe also “too hubristic.”
tiffanyh 11d ago
I wonder if bcantrill will ever get back into cloud hosting ... to revive his Joyent days (which he alludes to without naming directly in the post).
- jjuel 11d ago
  I mean in a way isn't that what Oxide is doing? Aren't they just providing you the hardware to do cloud hosting yourself on prem?
  - tiffanyh 11d ago
    On-prem vs cloud though, is two very different things. In the later, I don't have to worry about hardware/power/networking/etc at all.
bigbuppo 11d ago
As someone that buys hardware today, all the hardware companies are now in the "we don't want to do business with you" territory.
chalmovsky 11d ago
lol. at first i thought this is going to be about what Sun Tzu got wrong and i was ready to refute.
jedberg 11d ago
> Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business. I would contend that Sun was never interested in running a business. They always cared more about building amazing technology and suffered the sales to make money. You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them). Edit: I had on rose colored glasses. I was thinking of late 90s SUN. They did in fact start getting crushed in the early 2000s.
- nixon_why69 11d ago
  I loved Sun hardware but I'll deny that they were ahead of their time after 2003 or so. I had a boss who loved his pizza box but Intel/Linux crushed them in the 2000s on a price/performance basis.
- ragall 11d ago
  > You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them). From Brian Cantrill's original HN comment in 2011(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033): "I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC". SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.
  - throw0101a 11d ago
    >> You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them). > SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle. You seem to be focusing strictly on performance, but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86. With SPARC everything can be done on the CLI (serials consoles or SSH), with x86 quite often you're still clicking on "open KVM window" for so many things. And of course many/most vendors make you purchase an 'advanced license' to use the remote KVM functionality of the LOM system.
    - frutiger 11d ago
      Why is that a property of the ISA?
alexnewman 11d ago
Yea he’s wrong. Plenty of people switched to dell cause of Linux and open source . In our case the switch was from alpha and vms
Exoristos 11d ago
I'm perceiving a lot of enthusiasts of the race to the bottom here. Yes, Dell and Linux could offer prices and convenience that undercut frontier hardware companies like Sun and SGI. But now what do we have? The loss is palpable to those of us who used to work with varied hardware competing to awe us, not to mention filling niches much more satisfactorily than one-size-fits-all.
jonathaneunice 11d ago
Buying from Sun may have devolved into a direct-touch upsell disaster. Esp. compared to Dell which at one point was almost unique in having a working, easy-to-use web product configurator. Dell really nailed "getting products ordered and to the customer is part of the value equation"—a supply chain virtue no one else was really optimizing 1990–2005. But selling to Sun Microsystems as a vendor was a joy. It paid bills like clockwork (net 35 IIRC). Completely showed up all the multi-$B IT competitors. They preached hyper-efficiency, but Sun delivered it in its own dealings. Unfortunately after the dot-com downfall Sun extended days payments outstanding (DPO) just like everyone else.
rajtilakjee 11d ago
Sun? Sun Microsystem?
thomasfl 11d ago
We had a similar company in Norway in the 1980ies. Norsk Data (literally means Norwegian Computers) made computers, a multi taskin operating, a word processor thar inspired MS Word, a relational database on the same level as Oracle, the firsr web server was made by Tim Berners-Lee on one of their computers. It all went down because the managers kept insisting that they were a hardware company. The software was supposed to help selling their hardware. They were not good at making hardware.
- nickff 11d ago
  MS Word was a descendant of Bravo and Gypsy on the Xerox Alto, not ND-NOTIS. NOTIS is an interesting footnote in the history of software, but PARC's influence on early microcomputing is well-known and recognized. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto#Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto#Software [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software) [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-NOTIS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-NOTIS
- pasc1878 11d ago
  Berners-Lee made the first web server true but it was on a NeXT not Norsk Data
matt_heimer 11d ago
Sun was just never really setup to sell lots of small servers. You have different pipeline when your goal is to sell million dollar E10K servers. I got to see a server installed via crane because they couldn't go up in that building's elevator.
onraglanroad 11d ago
As an outsider at the time, when Linux was taking off, there seemed to be a lot of people asking why they wouldn't Open Source Solaris. It seemed to me like they couldn't decide whether they were a hardware company or a software company. Mind you, I was young at the time so possibly didn't have the best understanding of the situation. Seems like they left the decision too late though. Dismissing Linux as a hobbiest OS definitely turned out badly.
- goalieca 11d ago
  I remember the attitude was that solaris was for serious professionals and had the highest calibre of code. For the most part it seemed true and these were solid workhorses. But, i did end up finding concurrency bugs when they introduced their multi-core integer computing behemoth.
dcminter 11d ago
While we're reminiscing, I never did understand why Sun paid a billion dollars for MySQL in 2008. So far the best theory I've heard was that it was bait to make them tastier to IBM and Oracle - but even that seems kind of weak; had they really given up at that point? Does anyone have a better theory?
reenorap 11d ago
I worked on enterprise software around the turn of the century. There was no database/os combo more bullet proof than Oracle on Solaris. Solaris was a great OS but the speed and ferocity that Linux killed Sun was something I will never forget. I went to the Menlo Park offices to see a demo of their 64-cpu (I think) system at the time but it didn’t take long for Linux on intel killed the entire market.
kerblang 11d ago
HN lift of James Gosling's story about the radioactive UltraSparc II https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638929
f055 11d ago
I was once SUN Microsystems Campus Ambassador at Oxford University and our first lecture was about dtrace! The guy from SUN was blown away by attendance so the higher ups wanted to do more & more events in bigger rooms. But as corporate weeks passed, I started telling them to postpone because everyone was entering the exam sessions. Corporate of course did not listen. Long story short, SUN sent 3 experts but we couldn’t get the crowds and the main lecture room was embarrassingly empty.
schmichael 11d ago
As much as this resonates with me it smacks a bit too much of an Engineering vs Sales fight. Engineering blaming Sales for not selling, and Sales... where is the voice of Sales? By 2005 Sun's margins on hardware sales had to be under vicious attack from Dell and all the old incumbents. Google and Amazon were ushering in the era of commodified compute and soon offering it on demand on the cloud. Proprietary hardware platforms were under the most vigorous multi-front assault since the inception of computing. Meanwhile I have to imagine Sun, like IBM and everyone else at the time, was noticing what incredible margins you get from software services. No factories or fabs. No supply chain logistics. Sun's proprietary hardware business should have been dying (or at least radically shifting: a product/engineering problem, not a sales one) by all market indications of the time. So if I was a sales person and got a call from a startup for a colo's worth of machines... I probably don't have much incentive to pick up. The startup will probably fail, as most do, so the opportunity to build a relationship and sell higher margin services is probably nil. Startups hate paying for that stuff anyway. I have incredible respect for Bryan Cantrill. He obviously knows far more about this situation and business than I do, so he's almost definitely more correct than I am... However I would ask readers to at least be curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?" Or was it a rational choice and much deeper problems with Sun's business model were the cause of their demise?
- foobarian 11d ago
  I feel like Sun's main problem was that that era was pretty much the steepest part of the Intel S curve as far as chip performance goes, and it was outpacing the older chips on fab progress alone. I'm pretty sure had something like TSMC been around then at current strength, and Sun fabbed their excellent designs there, we'd have a mirror of what Apple is doing but in server space.
- Centigonal 11d ago
  I don't know what Sun's strategy was in the 2000s, but doing all of the R&D to develop exotic new hardware and then focusing the sales force on software seems like they're getting the worst of both worlds.
  - 11d ago
donflamenco 11d ago
Forget the hardware, I feel Sun could of continued their life as the business AWS became. Later on, when Schwartz was the CEO, they had a datacenter in a shipping container concept selling to management/IT folks. Delivering that infra via APIs to developers being the key differentiator. I'd love to hear Bryan's take since he was involved in the cloud space after he left.
alpha_trion 11d ago
There is a simple rule they forgot to follow: never make it difficult for customers to give you money. They had excellent hardware and software but that wasn’t enough to save them.
riazrizvi 11d ago
Very expensive and valuable information to come by, thanks for sharing.

386 points by chmaynard 11d ago

How timely, I was just thinking about Sun after doing some office rearranging last week and running into a bunch of sun branded ethernet cables.

coreyh14444 11d ago

As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.

sschueller 11d ago
For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates. Instead I can for example go to Thomas Kren and configure my serves online for a fraction of the cost. They have what they list in stock, delivered a few weeks later. Everything is clear and hasle free. At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
- bombcar 11d ago
  That’s exactly what enterprise sales is. Call for pricing, tell the absolute upper limit you can spend, and pay.
  - ako 11d ago
    A nicer way to frame it is: “value based pricing”.
  - fragmede 11d ago
    hire a salesperson to give them fake sales numbers and low ball them so you pay less?
- thevillagechief 11d ago
  I think this is a case of AI ruining the hardware market. We used to almost exclusively use Dell, but now we've been forced to look elsewhere and go through validating new vendors. The lead-times are ridiculous, and these guys now only pay attention to the really big guys. Not sure I can blame them though, you've gotta do what's best for your business.
  - ganoushoreilly 11d ago
    Dell was very much moving this way before modern AI explosion. The inconsistency on pricing alone depending on what rep was helping you also became a problem. I could often times call in direct and order via business line cheaper than dealing with my account rep. No reason to jump through so many hoops. I prefer the "This is the price" model and just make it consistent. I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general. Just let me buy it and move on.
    - dabraham1248 11d ago
      > I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general. Based on how things are moving, I think it's more likely that AI will _replace_ the layers of middle men (with layers of "middle AI"), then that those layers will be _removed_.
      - warkdarrior 11d ago
        Of course, the process (of squeezing the customer) is the point. The implementation of that process, with either human account reps or sales bots, is irrelevant.
        fragmede 11d ago
        Not to the account reps who's pay put food on their table, vs the bots who don't have children to feed.
    - fooker 11d ago
- dylan604 11d ago
  > At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate. This is precisely the role of the sales person for something like a service, but for a physical product it is pretty egregious. There is no greater sin than leaving money on the table. There's an old story about someone offering a quote that was apparently pretty low based on reaction, so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher.
  - hosteur 11d ago
    > so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher I don’t understand what this means? I understand that they bumped the price. But I du not understand what is meant by it being for the assistant? Care to explain?
    - Huppie 11d ago
      Not OP but the way I read it... Electrician: "Okay, so my services start at $100/hr" <nobody bats an eye> Electrician: "... for when my assistant can handle things." Replace Electrician by whatever skilled professional you prefer.
      - dylan604 11d ago
        Pretty much, except the assistant is never going to handle things and the updated fees go up to include you and the assistant. If you only ever send out your assistant, you never make money
  - yellowstuff 11d ago
    I like this version: The optician quotes the price of new glasses by saying "$100", waits to see if the customer flinches, "... for the lenses", waits again, "... each.".
  - marssaxman 11d ago
    I wonder how effective it really is, over the long term, to generate short-term profit by consuming trust like this.
- PaulHoule 11d ago
  The iron law is that vendors want to become like the old Sun. The only reason they don't is if they are trying to compete their way up the hill. Take away the old Sun and SGI and IBM and now Dell is Sun.
  - cherryteastain 11d ago
    Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps. All that Dell does is assembling standard, commoditized parts and putting a free OS on it. Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate, while Sun's business is extremely hard to replicate. Of course, Sun's competitive advantage turned into a curse when the components of that vertical integration become uncompetitive both features and price wise vs. the GNU/Linux-on-Intel stack. But regardless, Dell could never replicate the vertical integration Sun had.
    - PaulHoule 11d ago
      Really? When I first met Sun machines they were selling 68k-based Sun machines that were better specced than Apple and Amiga and such but left them dependent on Motorola’s architecture that had indirect address and thus no future. Sure they had an in house chip development ARM team right at the time when RISC economics looked good but CPU architecture had to work harder and harder to beat the memory wall and SPARC was not competitive by 2005 and “Hail Mary” projects like CoolThreads were difficult and expensive but did not deliver for customers. Hypothetically customers could benefit from that proprietary stuff but they benefit even more from rapid progress is competitive, commodity markets. When I was working at the library circa 2005 we were thinking about replacing all the Windows computers that patrons used to access the online catalog (and other services) with a web browser with Sun Rays, we probably would have bought a few hundred of them and we would have bought some SPARC servers to back them up. We could have gotten Netscape to run under Solaris but after a week of effort I wasn't able to get Mozilla to build, so no modern web browser. So no Sun Rays. No servers. DTrace and ZFS were great innovations but without the magic of "can run the software you need to run" they are just Blub. Had Sun done the work to get Mozilla running on their machines and forgotten about DTrace and ZFS people might still be using Solaris... but instead DTrace and ZFS found an audience by supporting... the commodity OS! (arguably at that time supporting a web browser was the #1, #2 and all the way through #99 task that the Solaris team should have been working on at that time and everything else from Java to Tcl to ZFS was a dangerous distraction... and that's how companies in a position like Sun die)
- RajT88 11d ago
  > At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you This is how license compliance shakedowns work. Make sure your DRM is more flexible than theicensing terms, find an overage and see what you can get the customer to agree to. I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.
- inanutshellus 11d ago
  DELL was an innovator in this "incomparable pricing" model for normal consumers. You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200. IIRC they won business awards for this. Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?
- walrus01 11d ago
  > For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates. I think this would be expected from a company that has acquired and absorbed EMC and Perot.
jmclnx 11d ago
And that is the "thing". Every failed mini company had the same exact issue, seems customers had to beg and/or go through hell to purchase equipment. Never mind that the hardware was more expensive than what you cold buy from companies like Dell. IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
- bch 11d ago
  And Redhat[0], and professional services a la Accenture[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#2010s%E2%80%93present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#2010s%E2%80%93present [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
  - esseph 11d ago
    Their old services arm was Kyndryl which they spun out as its own thing
- esseph 11d ago
  > IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business. Imagine every bank you know going through tech modernization and maybe 70% of those are now using Red Hat OpenShift. They own Red Hat (OpenShift kubernetes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform) AND HashiCorp (Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Packer, Vault, etc.) now, on top of their previous mainframe, services gigs, global financing arm, and calling everything they sell "watson".
- jhallenworld 11d ago
  I seem to remember IBM had a way to buy their stuff online, but not anymore apparently. I'm sure this was back in the System x days.
fidotron 11d ago
Sun commercial sales reps, at least in Europe, were astoundingly slimy. I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed. So when we could move to Dell we did.
- arethuza 11d ago
  I'm sure I have a memory of someone at Sun UK telling me about how they managed to run up a £30K bar bill at an event....
  - fidotron 11d ago
    Yeah that fits. I was in London (though not the City) and it was definitely that sort of scene. Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards. What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.
- roryirvine 11d ago
  Yeah, and it wasn't just the "call for pricing" game, it was having to deal with monthly "touching base" calls which were mostly an opportunity to push corporate hospitality and other not-quite-inducements. Whereas Dell just gave us a flat 30% discount on list pricing, and were clear in advance about what level of annual spend would trigger an increase to 35%. We'd order online and our sales rep would phone a few hours later to confirm. Other than that, they'd initiate contact maybe once a year when Dell refreshed their server or storage product lines and would offer to either send some bumpf or arrange for some demo kit. Dealing with them was so much less hassle all round, you never got covered in slime, and you never felt like they were on the verge of offering you bribes.
nunez 11d ago
Yeah, and then Dell more-or-less turned into that. Companies get big, customers and sales get more complicated, process gets more calcified. SUNW would probably still be around if the whole x86 commodity pizza box revolution hadn't happened OR if they had pivoted away from SPARC earlier and went heavily into x86. Example: buying from IBM doesn't sound too different from buying from Sun, but they're still around because mainframes will be around until the Earth implodes (probably). (I think that their channel/partner programs along with their professional services org are big reasons why Dell is still a key player in the datacenter space. You can buy Dell direct, and the sales process is still "good" as far as enterprise sales goes, but bigger players usually get their Dell kit through distributors/vendors with Dell professional services handling architecture, build-out, enablement, etc. I'm not sure how much energy SUNW invested in this, as they were before my time, but this combo is a major revenue driver for them.)
- pjmlp 11d ago
  Also thanks to virtualization being originally invented in mainframes, and the OS design done by IBM (and Unisys as well), they get to run the old workloads on modern hardware, and also support various UNIX flavours. You can even run most cool Python, Go, Java, Rust, PHP among others, on systems like z/OS.
- cyberpunk 11d ago
  We have a couple mainframes at work, had an incident last year when someone forgot to apply a new license to one. p1, no payments happening. I was kinda stunned; there’s a level of balls involved in selling an x millions machine and having it fail closed that I’m sort of impressed by but also utterly appalled they’d treat their big customers like that.. I mean surely to fuck it could have been an automated reminder email to the mothership and not just: sorry folks no banking for you today.
AdamN 11d ago
Yeah it was so much more accessible to play around with configs and pricing and then all you needed was a credit card. Even now I think enterprise companies should be more open about what's possible and what the price and delivery date would be without having to talk/chat/email anybody. Even for something like a Juniper $100k+ device it would be kind of cool to configure it.
proxysna 11d ago
I’ve had that experience with dell consistently over the last 6+ years. While with other vendors I can do everything over email from start to finish, Dell insists on meetings, follow-ups on topics that I said I am not interested in talking about, services that I do not need, meetings with teams I am not interested in meeting, reps that straight up skip meetings, so I have to console a junior rep that got stuck in a meeting that is above their pay grade. Different reps same slimy bs.
jimt1234 11d ago
I needed to add a bunch of capacity running Sun/Solaris back in the late-90s. Same thing: pointless meetings with sales reps without clarity in pricing. Finally, I found the gear we were looking for on eBay, bought it, drove over and picked it up in my Ford Explorer, and had it up-and-running in one day. To my surprise, people in my company were PO'ed. But I had air cover because the CEO found out and loved it.
walrus01 11d ago
> Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware. Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors. As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house". At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.
- kev009 11d ago
  It's easier to see in hindsight but servers have eaten a lot of macro economic headwinds. 1999 and 2002 correspond roughly to telecom and dotcom bubbles popping. So open source operating systems were also pulled up into these positions through a lot of work and by the early 2000s it was kind of obvious this was the way forward. 2008 financial crisis really knocked the high end (RISC/UNIX/Itanium) and started the long migration to renting vs owning. In hindsight it's remarkable how much money used to just be there in the economy of all this. But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.
  - walrus01 11d ago
    > But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is. It's not like there's less servers being sold, they're just bespoke designs from companies like the big Taiwanese ODMs that go straight into hyperscaler facilities, and we don't get to see public marketing websites and product info about them. The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.
dmitrygr 11d ago
On the other hand, Sun and DEC hardware from then still works today, if you care to power it on. How many dell devices do?
schmichael 11d ago
If you click through to the anecdote[0] mentioned in the article, the problem was not with having to contact a sales rep. In fact the startup wanted a sales rep. Sun specifically asked them to use the website: > More than once though, the Sun people did suggest I just buy the servers off the web site. Dell was just the only one to callback. I don't doubt your experience but that was at the height of Sun's business, not it's nadir as this article is about. [0] - https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-me/ https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...
Tangurena2 11d ago
One of the first "expert systems" was one that helped you spec your DEC computer. It was easy to order a VAX that was missing necessary hardware (or had incompatible hardware). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon

cmdrk 11d ago

when I was a student in the waning days of Sun, the SPARC/Solaris machines were impenetrable Big Iron guarded closely by the greybeards -- not to be touched by the likes of mere undergrads. Never really did get beyond noodling around with cast off gear from eBay, though I did get to enjoy a bit of it via the Sun DNA in SmartOS years later.

PaulHoule 11d ago
Our Sun rep served us well at an academic library. I had no problems provisioning a server with a nice storage array. When things fell apart at Sun our sales engineer from Sun wound up working for us.
dizhn 11d ago
I did get to sit in front of the consoles that served the whole school (via telnet) and even hard rebooted them a few times and I wasn't even in a techy major. Just had good relations with the head of school IT. That much exposure was enough to crave a similar computing experience and that's when I installed Linux at home right after college.

strappymcneeler 11d ago

Solaris lack of a package manager and crappy patches where patches replaced things wholesale, caused us a lot of overtime, but hey, got me a bigger house! Thanks Sun! Oh btw their hardware was way ahead of their shit software, which wasn’t as bad as shittier IBM or Digital or HP

dijit 11d ago
I still feel like we're catching up to SMF. But yeah, the lack of package manager hurt a lot, and there were competing third-party package managers which had totally different pro's/con's and packages and were incompatible with each other... what a mess. Compared to apt/yum it was kinda comical... but the first party software really was excellent otherwise.
jacquesm 11d ago
Yes. The software really wasn't all that great. I played a lot with Sun gear and had SGI stuff as well, the polish of the SGI machines vs the 1980's vibe that the Sun gear gave off was on a completely different level. Sun was quality hardware but the software was really a time capsule of what Unix workstations had looked like in the past.
rwmj 11d ago
Not to mention the horrible installer. At that time, Debian and Red Hat installs were super-easy compared to Solaris. And Sun controlled their own hardware stack too!

justin66 11d ago

Having read a lot of these things from ex-Sun employees, I dearly want to read one with the topic my department is the one that fucked up Sun. I don't think I have seen a topic like that yet.

bcantrill 11d ago
I actually haven't read a ton of these, so would love to be pointed to what you have found. But yes, everyone will be biased, and I am too. I think that the organization that I was in fucked up plenty (when I joined the company in 1996, SunSoft was led by truly one of the most incompetent executives I have ever encountered, a bumbling oaf that Sun kept putting in charge of different business units, letting him asphyxiate them one by one), but the fact that everyone also sees something else wrong probably tells you a few things: everyone at Sun earnestly wanted the company to succeed; Sun did a bunch of stuff right; Sun did a bunch of other stuff wrong. Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome -- and I think it's pretty telling that Sun's executive leadership basically went on to do more or less nothing after Sun. I loved Sun -- but it was a breeding ground for engineers, not executive leadership.
- justin66 11d ago
  I'm reluctant to call anyone out. I liked Sun a lot, as well as the people I've encountered who worked there. There was a thread between a couple of ex-Sun guys here on hn years ago - I can't find it right now - which made me feel there was a humorous and very human pattern in Sun postmortem comments: "man, that other team really killed Sun, we were doomed after that thing they did." I was pretty curious what the people on that other team (the SPARC microprocessor designers, in the case of that comment thread) might have said in their own defense, where they might have spread some of the blame, and so on. (perhaps it doesn't do your rather full blog post justice to compare it to something considerably less complete like a comment thread) > Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome I emphatically agree. Maybe it goes without saying but with Sun, multiple generations of leadership, I think.
jhbadger 11d ago

grahamlee 11d ago

The Sun model of beefy server, ultra-thin client worked incredibly well and presaged the widespread adoption of virtualisation that eventually led to cloud computing and containerised software. Unfortunately that model made it very easy to undercut their prices using commodity hardware; I managed a Solaris/Sun Ray network c.2004 and it was cheaper to switch to Linux/Intel and buy spare hardware to keep in a cupboard “just in case” than to keep the Sun network going through its support contract.

dijit 11d ago
it is often cheaper to buy a spare of something and throw it in a cupboard rather than have a support contract. I have a bunch of Aruba switches and this is what we do, because it's a lot cheaper.
- bluGill 11d ago
  If you are only buying a single spare that is the case. Support contracts make sense when you would want several dozen spares.
  - dijit 11d ago
    if a support contract is 70% of the cost of something, then for every 2 of something a spare is cheaper. For Aruba I think it was 1:1; a support contract was the same price as the device itself over 2 years or something. Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices, so your cost scales with the amount you have... so I'm not sure I follow what you're saying.. Unless you mean to imply that you're replacing units more than once every 2 years, in which case of course you're right... but then I might consider going with another vendor entirely because that is a pretty terrible reliability record.
    - bluGill 11d ago
      There are lots of different support contracts. Some of them really do cover the entire site. You seem to not realize the scale of a large data center. If every device lasts 5 years you are replacing 10 per day is not unheard of.

ChrisArchitect 11d ago

Love that t-shirt. Does it have the Meta logo on the back of it? /s

titzer 11d ago

I interned for Sun and then worked as an MTS in Sun Labs for a couple of years. I miss Sun; I think they were very much an engineer's company that was spoiled by two things: big success in the early workstation market, and the dumb luck of the dot com boom. Sun hardware was solid (even though they fell behind the curve because of mismanagement of a couple of CPU lines), and its kernel (Solaris) was one of the well-engineered kernels ever. While any business makes some bad business decisions from time to time, one thing that was fatal was a crippling enterprise focus that failed to understand the huge growth opportunity that OSS and Linux represented. It was growth in a direction they not only didn't understand, but refused to understand, study, or adapt to. Sun's heyday was in the boom. The fish were jumping in the boat. So naturally they were building bigger and bigger boats. There was always the one-off ideas that might have gone here or there, but that core server cow just seemed like an endless source of cash. Thus they neglected the workstation market and ironically, the market for anything bigger than one single server rack. They didn't understand horizontal scaling, and the rise of cheap-but-replaceable consumer hardware like how Google did things was alien to them. They poo-poo'ed Linux, they killed and then unkilled Solaris x86, and a number of other things. I do miss Sun though. As far as engineering goes, they were a very serious company full of serious engineers. Basically the polar opposite of 10X tech bros and startup culture.

bcantrill 11d ago
Oof, the killing and subsequent unkilling of Solaris x86 in 2002 brings back very bad memories -- Sun management at its worst. It also highlighted the relative power of Sun's engineering in that everyone in Solaris knew it was the wrong decision, and we more or less disobeyed orders: during that period (January 2002 to August 2002, when it was reversed), we didn't change our treatment of x86. (And in particular, breaking x86 was grounds for a putback to be backed out.) When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.
lokar 11d ago
I worked at sun (sunsoft) right out of school near the peak. It was great. I was very excited to have all of the sources for sunos easily available to read. Later, in grad school I went to work at a startup… google. For me it recaptured everything I liked about Sun. And had the same CEO.

flanked-evergl 11d ago

Solaris was worse than Linux, and SPARC was worse than Intel. A lot worse. Even ZFS was way better integrated with the Linux kernel even while Solaris was supposedly maintained.

whobre 11d ago
Eh, depends when. In 2005, sure. Not so much in the 1990s
- icedchai 11d ago
  Yep. Solaris was the Unix for the 90's. I worked at a couple of early ISPs and users demanded Sun Solaris shell servers. At a couple of startups, we built everything on Solaris because Linux wasn't accepted in the enterprise yet. By the early 2000's, 1) Linux was solid, why bother with Solaris? 2) ebay and other channels were flooded with used Sun hardware from failed dot-com companies anyway. No need to buy new.
- rwmj 11d ago
  I was asked to benchmark some Solaris/SPARC vs Linux/Intel hardware in around 1997, and the price-performance of the Linux gear was easily 3+ times better. There wasn't really any comparison, especially when you consider how you could buy white box PCs from a local shop, grab a Red Hat ISO for nothing, and have an installed Linux server in 24 hours, compared to weeks to get something more expensive and worse for the Sun option. Even if Sun had been more reliable, it wouldn't have mattered because you could buy 3x the PCs and keep two in a cupboard, or more likely just replace everything with more numerous and better performing Linux PCs which was what we did.
  - pjmlp 11d ago
    Assuming that the PC was actually supported. I had to survive with 800x600 on a 1024x768 monitor for quite some time.
pjmlp 11d ago
Not in 2000, at my employer back then, our Linux server was only good as MP3 storage exposed via Samba/NFS. All development and production deployments was being done across Solaris, Aix and HP-UX in regards to UNIX flavours.

ImJasonH 11d ago

> all of these homage shirts are amazing You can't just say that without sharing those too!

RationPhantoms 11d ago
Brian, I know you lurk and post here but i'd love to see those designs make their way to the store so the general public can purchase them.
- bcantrill 11d ago
  Heh, yeah, we're hearing that a lot. We'll find a way of getting these out to people, but we're still debating the best way to do that (running an online store isn't zero work -- but it's also not an unsolved problem!). Stay tuned!
  - rachr 11d ago
    Awesome. I'm not in a position at my company to move the needle much in terms of buying, but I would love to support you guys any way I can.

Zigurd 11d ago

Making workstations even in the dominant market position that Sun had, was a cottage industry compared to technology today, and it was managed that way. I wouldn't blame management for Sun being irrelevant now. What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. Not even Xerox. I've used aa Xerox Alto, a Sun workstation, an LMI CADR, and a Symbolics 3600, and none of them were as carefully crafted as a Macintosh with a tiny memory and a floppy disk. Next inherited this ethic. Jobs valued the person using the machine more than anything else about the machine.

arethuza 11d ago
My personal favourite UI was HyperNeWS built on Sun's NeWS. Edit: Writing PostScript and having no discernible security probably didn't make NeWS a great fit for the world of the Internet - but it was a lot of fun.
TacticalCoder 11d ago
> What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times. Sun, just like SGI, got attacked by cheap beige PCs running either Windows or Linux. I don't think their UI had much to do with their downfall and, arguably, SGI's UIs were better than the competition and they still disappeared too. Also weren't most machines sold by Sun servers anyway? Their famous "We the dot in .com" tagline.
- AceJohnny2 11d ago
  Linux was free, and people will put up with a lot of shit for that.
  - SoftTalker 11d ago
    Exactly. Free vs. $8k (in 1990 dollars) for a NeXT computer was a pretty easy choice for most people.

ecshafer 11d ago

Part of my maturing as I've gotten older is realizing how much business success actually comes from Sales, BizzDev, Product, etc. Engineering is great, but if you don't have people actually getting things shipped, getting customers, and talking with customers, you will eventually fail. Sure sometimes some internet companies find a money printer and get around this, but I think they are the exceptions to the rule. Sun having great tech, but having a shit sales channel, is not going to lead to success. Dell, small or large, they are going to get you someone on the phone and sell you a server.

kevin_nisbet 11d ago
Part of my maturing with getting older in addition to the above is that luck is a larger factor than most people are willing to admit. So I'm with you that GTM is just as important as engineering, but execution on all fronts is what tilts the luck factor. And with luck you get exceptions which is why you can get companies that seem to succeed despite themselves.

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DonHopkins 11d ago

Speaking of another Steven, the Dell Dude: Things were going great at Dell until its wildly popular advertising campaign suddenly came tumbling down over an unfortunate indiscretion on the Lower East Side that surprised absolutely nobody... https://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/02/10/deli.dude.arrest/ https://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/02/10/deli.dude.arrest/ >'Dell Dude' arrested for marijuana possession >Monday, February 10, 2003 Posted: 3:55 PM EST (2055 GMT) >NEW YORK (CNN) -- Benjamin Curtis, better known as the "Dell Dude" from the computer company's television commercials, was arrested Sunday while he allegedly attempted to buy marijuana on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Steve The Dell Dude Commercial Compilation (DUDE WE'RE GETTING A DELL!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJxTHMygpDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJxTHMygpDY

deleted 11d ago
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kens 11d ago

I worked at Sun from 1995 to 2004. My take is that Sun had major structural problems all along, but as long as money streamed in from the tech bubble, these issues could be ignored. When the tech bubble ended, it was too late to fix the problems. One big problem was that there was no cooperation inside Sun. Groups in Sun kind of viewed HP as a competitor, kind of viewed SGI as a competitor, but the real competitor to be destroyed was that other group in Sun. The leaders of the project I worked on spent most of their time in political battles, trying to acquire or outmaneuver the other teams working on similar projects. Another problem was that the main parts of Sun had conflicting strategies. The Solaris/SunSoft division wanted to run on SPARC, x86, and Power PC for the largest market. The SPARC division, of course, wanted none of that. The hardware division wanted to make expensive servers, but the other teams saw cheaper hardware as the right direction. The market ended up moving to cheap rack-mounted Linux x86 servers, so nobody at Sun won in the end.

jeffbee 11d ago
Right before they fell face-first into the grave, they did finally ship the v20z, which was a completely reasonable way to run Solaris x86. Its management board ran Linux on PowerPC, for irony purposes.

thegagne 11d ago

Since we're sharing, I have fond memories of my using my the Sun thin clients at university. They were slow to start up and use for the most part, but once you got to the terminal... it was great. Being a hacker-type, I did everything with it. Email? Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine. Want some html on my personal page? Use vi. I think they didn't take away my access for years after college, and I would sometimes login and poke around just for fun. I do blame them, along with the rise of Java and the awful gui toolkit motif for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I was so frustrated that our grades were dependent on learning something that I saw as completely worthless in light of the dotcom boom happening at the time. I wanted them to teach us web technologies, or at least some good system code, but all I got was broken x11 and awful performance.

nailer 11d ago
> I do blame them, along with the rise of Java ...for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I avoided studying CS for this reason: I saw my girlfriend's Java textbooks and thought if I had to appreciate this, I wasn't cut out to be a programmer, and stuck to network engineering. Years later, after 'Gang of Four' style OOP started dying, I have some code in a new things people use here everyday.
not_a_bot_4sho 11d ago
I appreciate this comment for reviving memories of pine and lynx and all of that
forinti 11d ago
I used a machine that had 8MB of RAM and a huge b&w monitor. One day I found out it would crash if your process forked more than 127 times. These things were so cool at the time but are nothing compared to a Raspberry Pi.
- flyinghamster 11d ago
  It's absolutely crazy to realize that even a Pi 400 running from MicroSD would smoke classic workstations of yesteryear, and yet by today's standards it's slow.

whalesalad 11d ago

Where can one buy the Oxide t-shirt

gadders 11d ago

The good thing about Sun (when working at a corporate customer) was that they were very good at getting their distinguished tech people into give talks - Tim Bray, James Gosling etc.

labrador 11d ago

I sold my Sun stock at the internet bubble top for $70 a share. A few months later it was $7. I think of that when I see PE ratios in the hundreds for Tesla, SpaceX and other AI stocks.

nradov 11d ago
Good timing. But on the other hand if you had sold AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, ORCL, AVGO, ADI, KLAC, LRCX, etc at the Internet bubble top then you would have missed out on huge gains since then.
metaphor 11d ago
Scott McNealy had a few choice words in retrospect[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950311

traveltalk 11d ago

that right

nielsbot 11d ago

I worked there right before they sold to Oracle for a bit—my impression was a lot of brilliant engineers but no unified product story.

keeda 11d ago

I know OP has an intimately inside perspective, whereas what I know about Sun is only from what I read online as an admirer and developer on its platforms… but “gotten bored of the mechanics of running a business” does not match what seemed to be more about having gotten “too enterprise-y” or “too out of touch with the market” and maybe also “too hubristic.”

tiffanyh 11d ago

I wonder if bcantrill will ever get back into cloud hosting ... to revive his Joyent days (which he alludes to without naming directly in the post).

jjuel 11d ago
I mean in a way isn't that what Oxide is doing? Aren't they just providing you the hardware to do cloud hosting yourself on prem?
- tiffanyh 11d ago
  On-prem vs cloud though, is two very different things. In the later, I don't have to worry about hardware/power/networking/etc at all.

bigbuppo 11d ago

As someone that buys hardware today, all the hardware companies are now in the "we don't want to do business with you" territory.

chalmovsky 11d ago

lol. at first i thought this is going to be about what Sun Tzu got wrong and i was ready to refute.

jedberg 11d ago

> Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business. I would contend that Sun was never interested in running a business. They always cared more about building amazing technology and suffered the sales to make money. You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them). Edit: I had on rose colored glasses. I was thinking of late 90s SUN. They did in fact start getting crushed in the early 2000s.

nixon_why69 11d ago
I loved Sun hardware but I'll deny that they were ahead of their time after 2003 or so. I had a boss who loved his pizza box but Intel/Linux crushed them in the 2000s on a price/performance basis.
ragall 11d ago
> You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them). From Brian Cantrill's original HN comment in 2011(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033): "I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC". SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.
- throw0101a 11d ago
  >> You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them). > SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle. You seem to be focusing strictly on performance, but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86. With SPARC everything can be done on the CLI (serials consoles or SSH), with x86 quite often you're still clicking on "open KVM window" for so many things. And of course many/most vendors make you purchase an 'advanced license' to use the remote KVM functionality of the LOM system.
  - frutiger 11d ago
    Why is that a property of the ISA?

alexnewman 11d ago

Yea he’s wrong. Plenty of people switched to dell cause of Linux and open source . In our case the switch was from alpha and vms

Exoristos 11d ago

I'm perceiving a lot of enthusiasts of the race to the bottom here. Yes, Dell and Linux could offer prices and convenience that undercut frontier hardware companies like Sun and SGI. But now what do we have? The loss is palpable to those of us who used to work with varied hardware competing to awe us, not to mention filling niches much more satisfactorily than one-size-fits-all.

jonathaneunice 11d ago

Buying from Sun may have devolved into a direct-touch upsell disaster. Esp. compared to Dell which at one point was almost unique in having a working, easy-to-use web product configurator. Dell really nailed "getting products ordered and to the customer is part of the value equation"—a supply chain virtue no one else was really optimizing 1990–2005. But selling to Sun Microsystems as a vendor was a joy. It paid bills like clockwork (net 35 IIRC). Completely showed up all the multi-$B IT competitors. They preached hyper-efficiency, but Sun delivered it in its own dealings. Unfortunately after the dot-com downfall Sun extended days payments outstanding (DPO) just like everyone else.

rajtilakjee 11d ago

Sun? Sun Microsystem?

thomasfl 11d ago

We had a similar company in Norway in the 1980ies. Norsk Data (literally means Norwegian Computers) made computers, a multi taskin operating, a word processor thar inspired MS Word, a relational database on the same level as Oracle, the firsr web server was made by Tim Berners-Lee on one of their computers. It all went down because the managers kept insisting that they were a hardware company. The software was supposed to help selling their hardware. They were not good at making hardware.

nickff 11d ago
MS Word was a descendant of Bravo and Gypsy on the Xerox Alto, not ND-NOTIS. NOTIS is an interesting footnote in the history of software, but PARC's influence on early microcomputing is well-known and recognized. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto#Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto#Software [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software) [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-NOTIS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-NOTIS
pasc1878 11d ago
Berners-Lee made the first web server true but it was on a NeXT not Norsk Data

matt_heimer 11d ago

Sun was just never really setup to sell lots of small servers. You have different pipeline when your goal is to sell million dollar E10K servers. I got to see a server installed via crane because they couldn't go up in that building's elevator.

onraglanroad 11d ago

As an outsider at the time, when Linux was taking off, there seemed to be a lot of people asking why they wouldn't Open Source Solaris. It seemed to me like they couldn't decide whether they were a hardware company or a software company. Mind you, I was young at the time so possibly didn't have the best understanding of the situation. Seems like they left the decision too late though. Dismissing Linux as a hobbiest OS definitely turned out badly.

goalieca 11d ago
I remember the attitude was that solaris was for serious professionals and had the highest calibre of code. For the most part it seemed true and these were solid workhorses. But, i did end up finding concurrency bugs when they introduced their multi-core integer computing behemoth.

dcminter 11d ago

While we're reminiscing, I never did understand why Sun paid a billion dollars for MySQL in 2008. So far the best theory I've heard was that it was bait to make them tastier to IBM and Oracle - but even that seems kind of weak; had they really given up at that point? Does anyone have a better theory?

reenorap 11d ago

I worked on enterprise software around the turn of the century. There was no database/os combo more bullet proof than Oracle on Solaris. Solaris was a great OS but the speed and ferocity that Linux killed Sun was something I will never forget. I went to the Menlo Park offices to see a demo of their 64-cpu (I think) system at the time but it didn’t take long for Linux on intel killed the entire market.

kerblang 11d ago

HN lift of James Gosling's story about the radioactive UltraSparc II https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638929

f055 11d ago

I was once SUN Microsystems Campus Ambassador at Oxford University and our first lecture was about dtrace! The guy from SUN was blown away by attendance so the higher ups wanted to do more & more events in bigger rooms. But as corporate weeks passed, I started telling them to postpone because everyone was entering the exam sessions. Corporate of course did not listen. Long story short, SUN sent 3 experts but we couldn’t get the crowds and the main lecture room was embarrassingly empty.

schmichael 11d ago

As much as this resonates with me it smacks a bit too much of an Engineering vs Sales fight. Engineering blaming Sales for not selling, and Sales... where is the voice of Sales? By 2005 Sun's margins on hardware sales had to be under vicious attack from Dell and all the old incumbents. Google and Amazon were ushering in the era of commodified compute and soon offering it on demand on the cloud. Proprietary hardware platforms were under the most vigorous multi-front assault since the inception of computing. Meanwhile I have to imagine Sun, like IBM and everyone else at the time, was noticing what incredible margins you get from software services. No factories or fabs. No supply chain logistics. Sun's proprietary hardware business should have been dying (or at least radically shifting: a product/engineering problem, not a sales one) by all market indications of the time. So if I was a sales person and got a call from a startup for a colo's worth of machines... I probably don't have much incentive to pick up. The startup will probably fail, as most do, so the opportunity to build a relationship and sell higher margin services is probably nil. Startups hate paying for that stuff anyway. I have incredible respect for Bryan Cantrill. He obviously knows far more about this situation and business than I do, so he's almost definitely more correct than I am... However I would ask readers to at least be curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?" Or was it a rational choice and much deeper problems with Sun's business model were the cause of their demise?

foobarian 11d ago
I feel like Sun's main problem was that that era was pretty much the steepest part of the Intel S curve as far as chip performance goes, and it was outpacing the older chips on fab progress alone. I'm pretty sure had something like TSMC been around then at current strength, and Sun fabbed their excellent designs there, we'd have a mirror of what Apple is doing but in server space.
Centigonal 11d ago
I don't know what Sun's strategy was in the 2000s, but doing all of the R&D to develop exotic new hardware and then focusing the sales force on software seems like they're getting the worst of both worlds.
- 11d ago

donflamenco 11d ago

Forget the hardware, I feel Sun could of continued their life as the business AWS became. Later on, when Schwartz was the CEO, they had a datacenter in a shipping container concept selling to management/IT folks. Delivering that infra via APIs to developers being the key differentiator. I'd love to hear Bryan's take since he was involved in the cloud space after he left.

alpha_trion 11d ago

There is a simple rule they forgot to follow: never make it difficult for customers to give you money. They had excellent hardware and software but that wasn’t enough to save them.

riazrizvi 11d ago

Very expensive and valuable information to come by, thanks for sharing.