13 ms·

Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems

115 points by VonGuard 17y ago

Shareholders voted today to officially sell the company to Oracle. And Jonathan Schwartz wasn't even in the room when it happened.

spitfire 17y ago
Such a shame. They made fantastic products but just couldn't keep up the pace as time went on.
- adharmad 17y ago
  They could not sell those products.
Musashi 17y ago
This is sad... They used to be a damned good company with good techies.
- quisxt 17y ago
  ...but absolutely terrible leadership that couldn't figure out where they wanted to go, or how to get there and ended up going nowhere.
  - access_denied 17y ago
    The same applies to Commodore.
- zandorg 17y ago
  But as these companies stop growing, the stock options are worthless, and people jump ship to the next Google where their stock will go skyhigh.
jf 17y ago
Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.
- malkia 17y ago
  Well, wasn't VirtualBox developed outside, then bought? But you forgot Self (it was done by Sun right?), and other cool things :)
  - jf 17y ago
    Yes, you're correct about VirtualBox. And I left out many things from the long of stuff that they open sourced ...
- old-gregg 17y ago
  Java never felt "new" to me: rather unnecessarily bloated and slow and not offering enough high-level language features to justify the performance penalty over C. Managing memory in C never felt "hard" and when I needed something for quick hacking I could use VB and/or Delphi. Funny, but in many ways Visual Basic has been far superior RAD tool for enterprise SQL pushing. Yes, it was garbage-collected, ran in its own VM and produced fast-launching executables. In mid/late 90s words like "Oracle", "Sun", "Solaris" and "Java" were used predominantly by older fat-faced salesmen types, while cool kids were coding C on Windows or playing with Linux. Yes, Microsoft was fun back then: it felt young, modern and innovative. Gates and Allen were Brin and Page of the 90s. I was doing some cool real-time data acquisition/analytics on Windows NT with C++ and MFC. Yes, it felt bad-ass. In my geek circles Borland was considered the most exciting software company at the time. Sun/Oracle and IBM with OS/2? Those were for banks and GM. Sun hasn't changed since then. I have nothing to thank this company for, except that with Java, they dumbed down our profession to nearly data-entry status and introduced an intolerable boredom to the world of software hacking, something it was missing before 1995. I also believe Java suppressed the development and widespread adoption of Lisp, Smalltalk, ML and Haskell: before Java lots of folks couldn't use them because computers weren't powerful enough, but now they aren't using them because schools stopped teaching and switched to vocational java training. I wasn't surprised Oracle bought them. Their "Oracle Forms" BS always sucked. With Java and armies of school-trained drones supplemented by Indian outsourcers they finally have a wonderful distribution channel to keep pushing their overpriced stuff through. I guess SAP could buy them too. I've been fortunate enough to avoid this market, so I won't be missing anything.
jeremymims 17y ago
This was the real success of Linux. It didn't take over the consumer desktop market, but it sure decimated the need for specialty servers and proprietary server operating systems. Once Sun was forced to compete in the commodity hardware market, it was over.
- lallysingh 17y ago
  Indeed, while Dell, et. al. just spent their time pumping out ever-cheaper products, Sun actually spent cash developing the aformentionted technologies. Nice "real success": killing the innovators in the UNIX space and letting the vultures come in and eat up all the market share.
  - mseebach 17y ago
    SPARC with Solaris is pretty inferior to Linux on x86 for many purposes, including the entire web-stack. This competition forced Sun to innovate, giving us the UltraSPARC T1 and T2, which is simply amazing technology. Suns UNIX innovation (i.e. Solaris 10 with dtrace and ZFS) came as a response to the success of Linux, not in spite of it. Sun paused to sleep on their .com laurels, and it killed them.
- jhugbj 17y ago
  Still they outlasted, DEC, SGI, Pyramid and all the other minicomputer/workstation makers.
  - 10ren 17y ago
    Yes, Sun and Digital (DEC) got killed by the same thing - Clayton Christensen on Digital (not Sun): Every disruption has three components to it: a technological enabler, a business model innovation and a new commercial ecosystem. In computing, the technological enabler of disruption in computing was the microprocessor. It so simplified the design of a computer that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs could just slap one together in a garage. It transformed the industry’s fundamental technological problem—the design of a computer—from a problem that took hundreds of people several years to solve into one that was much simpler. Then that simplifying technology had to be married with a business model that could take the technology into the market in a cost-effective and convenient way. Digital Equipment Corp. had microprocessor technology, but its business model could not profitably sell a computer for less than $50,000. The technology trapped in a high-cost business model had no impact on the world, and in fact, the world ultimately killed Digital. But IBM Corp., with the very same processors at its disposal, set up a different business model in Florida that could make money at a $2,000 price point and 20% gross margins—and changed the world. It’s a combination of the technology and business model that makes formerly complicated, expensive, inaccessible things affordable and accessible. http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache%3Asloanreview.mit.edu%2Fthe-magazine%2Farticles%2F2009%2Fspring%2F50314%2Fgood-days-for-disruptors%2F+%22every%20disruption%20has%20three%20components%20to%20it%22 http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache%3Asloanreview.mit.edu%2...
ramoq 17y ago
can't help but feel down. i really enjoy developing in java :(
- timcederman 17y ago
  You think Java will be discontinued?
  - malkia 17y ago
    I dunno. Hard to tell, but I hope not. The language might suck, but the JVM is rocking!
  - schizoidboy 17y ago
    I doubt it because IBM has too much skin in the game. Few people are aware, but IBM produces its own JDK: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/ https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/
    - davidw 17y ago
      For that matter, the Apache Software Foundation has a Java implementation called 'Harmony', although I'm not sure they're allowed to call it Java.
      - brianm 17y ago
        That is a sadly long and storied history, which Stephen Colebourne describes best: http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/sun_apache_ip_in_pictures http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/sun_apache_ip_in_pi... There is some hope that the legal shenanigans will stop once ORCL finishes taking ownership of JAVA.
    - felipe 17y ago
      BEA has its own JVM as well, and guess who bought BEA? http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jrockit/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jrockit/index.html By the way, I think JRockIt is the best JVM out there for server-side deployments. I've used both JRockIt and Sun's JVM on EC2, and JRockIt has much better memory management.
andeka 17y ago
Sun - The stanford university network.
- jingsong 17y ago
  Bill Joy was from Berkeley though.
  - ucdaz 17y ago
    It was two Stanford guys and one Berkeley dude. 2 Votes for Stanford Univ Networks 1 Vote for UC Berekeley Networks Bill Joy: "$%^&! I want it to be called UCBN! It has a better ring to it! No?"
    - dmv 17y ago
      Or given Sun's history with big endian: NBCU!
deleted 17y ago
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datums 17y ago
Today I was reading about Bill Joy in Outliers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy I wonder about the future of MySQL.
jong 17y ago
So long and thanks for all the fish
bitwize 17y ago
What will become of SPARC?

115 points by VonGuard 17y ago

Shareholders voted today to officially sell the company to Oracle. And Jonathan Schwartz wasn't even in the room when it happened.

spitfire 17y ago

Such a shame. They made fantastic products but just couldn't keep up the pace as time went on.

adharmad 17y ago
They could not sell those products.

Musashi 17y ago

This is sad... They used to be a damned good company with good techies.

quisxt 17y ago
...but absolutely terrible leadership that couldn't figure out where they wanted to go, or how to get there and ended up going nowhere.
- access_denied 17y ago
  The same applies to Commodore.
zandorg 17y ago
But as these companies stop growing, the stock options are worthless, and people jump ship to the next Google where their stock will go skyhigh.

jf 17y ago

Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox. I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.

malkia 17y ago
Well, wasn't VirtualBox developed outside, then bought? But you forgot Self (it was done by Sun right?), and other cool things :)
- jf 17y ago
  Yes, you're correct about VirtualBox. And I left out many things from the long of stuff that they open sourced ...
old-gregg 17y ago
Java never felt "new" to me: rather unnecessarily bloated and slow and not offering enough high-level language features to justify the performance penalty over C. Managing memory in C never felt "hard" and when I needed something for quick hacking I could use VB and/or Delphi. Funny, but in many ways Visual Basic has been far superior RAD tool for enterprise SQL pushing. Yes, it was garbage-collected, ran in its own VM and produced fast-launching executables. In mid/late 90s words like "Oracle", "Sun", "Solaris" and "Java" were used predominantly by older fat-faced salesmen types, while cool kids were coding C on Windows or playing with Linux. Yes, Microsoft was fun back then: it felt young, modern and innovative. Gates and Allen were Brin and Page of the 90s. I was doing some cool real-time data acquisition/analytics on Windows NT with C++ and MFC. Yes, it felt bad-ass. In my geek circles Borland was considered the most exciting software company at the time. Sun/Oracle and IBM with OS/2? Those were for banks and GM. Sun hasn't changed since then. I have nothing to thank this company for, except that with Java, they dumbed down our profession to nearly data-entry status and introduced an intolerable boredom to the world of software hacking, something it was missing before 1995. I also believe Java suppressed the development and widespread adoption of Lisp, Smalltalk, ML and Haskell: before Java lots of folks couldn't use them because computers weren't powerful enough, but now they aren't using them because schools stopped teaching and switched to vocational java training. I wasn't surprised Oracle bought them. Their "Oracle Forms" BS always sucked. With Java and armies of school-trained drones supplemented by Indian outsourcers they finally have a wonderful distribution channel to keep pushing their overpriced stuff through. I guess SAP could buy them too. I've been fortunate enough to avoid this market, so I won't be missing anything.

jeremymims 17y ago

This was the real success of Linux. It didn't take over the consumer desktop market, but it sure decimated the need for specialty servers and proprietary server operating systems. Once Sun was forced to compete in the commodity hardware market, it was over.

lallysingh 17y ago
Indeed, while Dell, et. al. just spent their time pumping out ever-cheaper products, Sun actually spent cash developing the aformentionted technologies. Nice "real success": killing the innovators in the UNIX space and letting the vultures come in and eat up all the market share.
- mseebach 17y ago
  SPARC with Solaris is pretty inferior to Linux on x86 for many purposes, including the entire web-stack. This competition forced Sun to innovate, giving us the UltraSPARC T1 and T2, which is simply amazing technology. Suns UNIX innovation (i.e. Solaris 10 with dtrace and ZFS) came as a response to the success of Linux, not in spite of it. Sun paused to sleep on their .com laurels, and it killed them.
jhugbj 17y ago
Still they outlasted, DEC, SGI, Pyramid and all the other minicomputer/workstation makers.
- 10ren 17y ago
  Yes, Sun and Digital (DEC) got killed by the same thing - Clayton Christensen on Digital (not Sun): Every disruption has three components to it: a technological enabler, a business model innovation and a new commercial ecosystem. In computing, the technological enabler of disruption in computing was the microprocessor. It so simplified the design of a computer that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs could just slap one together in a garage. It transformed the industry’s fundamental technological problem—the design of a computer—from a problem that took hundreds of people several years to solve into one that was much simpler. Then that simplifying technology had to be married with a business model that could take the technology into the market in a cost-effective and convenient way. Digital Equipment Corp. had microprocessor technology, but its business model could not profitably sell a computer for less than $50,000. The technology trapped in a high-cost business model had no impact on the world, and in fact, the world ultimately killed Digital. But IBM Corp., with the very same processors at its disposal, set up a different business model in Florida that could make money at a $2,000 price point and 20% gross margins—and changed the world. It’s a combination of the technology and business model that makes formerly complicated, expensive, inaccessible things affordable and accessible. http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache%3Asloanreview.mit.edu%2Fthe-magazine%2Farticles%2F2009%2Fspring%2F50314%2Fgood-days-for-disruptors%2F+%22every%20disruption%20has%20three%20components%20to%20it%22 http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache%3Asloanreview.mit.edu%2...

ramoq 17y ago

can't help but feel down. i really enjoy developing in java :(

timcederman 17y ago
You think Java will be discontinued?
- malkia 17y ago
  I dunno. Hard to tell, but I hope not. The language might suck, but the JVM is rocking!
- schizoidboy 17y ago
  I doubt it because IBM has too much skin in the game. Few people are aware, but IBM produces its own JDK: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/ https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/
  - davidw 17y ago
    For that matter, the Apache Software Foundation has a Java implementation called 'Harmony', although I'm not sure they're allowed to call it Java.
    - brianm 17y ago
      That is a sadly long and storied history, which Stephen Colebourne describes best: http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/sun_apache_ip_in_pictures http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/sun_apache_ip_in_pi... There is some hope that the legal shenanigans will stop once ORCL finishes taking ownership of JAVA.
  - felipe 17y ago
    BEA has its own JVM as well, and guess who bought BEA? http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jrockit/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jrockit/index.html By the way, I think JRockIt is the best JVM out there for server-side deployments. I've used both JRockIt and Sun's JVM on EC2, and JRockIt has much better memory management.

andeka 17y ago

Sun - The stanford university network.

jingsong 17y ago
Bill Joy was from Berkeley though.
- ucdaz 17y ago
  It was two Stanford guys and one Berkeley dude. 2 Votes for Stanford Univ Networks 1 Vote for UC Berekeley Networks Bill Joy: "$%^&! I want it to be called UCBN! It has a better ring to it! No?"
  - dmv 17y ago
    Or given Sun's history with big endian: NBCU!

deleted 17y ago

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deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

datums 17y ago

Today I was reading about Bill Joy in Outliers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy I wonder about the future of MySQL.

jong 17y ago

So long and thanks for all the fish

bitwize 17y ago

What will become of SPARC?