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Just about everything said here about "Solaris engineering" is false. For example: Perhaps this means that Sun was brave where other companies feared to tread

Just about everything said here about "Solaris engineering" is false. For example: Perhaps this means that Sun was brave where other companies feared to tread --- but given that (a) various ex-Sun employees have stated that there was a lot of Solaris engineering work was done before consulting the marketing or sales "tribes", and (b) ultimately, Sun wasn't able to succeed in the marketplace --- leads me to propose that maybe pouring all of that engineering effort into ZFS and dtrace (while both are amazing technologies, I will be the first to acknowledge) --- perhaps wasn't a good product/market fit, and that a VC who looked at things from a very cold-hearted profit and loss perspective would have never allowed a lot of the Solaris engineering work to go on as long as it had unless there was a demonstrated way it could be somehow monetized. Ignoring the terrible reasoning (correlation does not imply causation) and the child-like view of venture capital, this is wrong on the facts: the ZFS and (especially) DTrace teams were tiny; the work that we did was with management's blessing; the work that we did was a direct result of our experiences with customers; and (most importantly, from my perspective), the work paid for itself many, many times over. In fact, this work had paid for itself many times over even before 2006 when the core members of the DTrace and ZFS teams started a new effort inside of Sun to build a new line of products based on the two technologies.[1] The resulting product -- which we had initially projected to be a $1 billion business within five years -- paid for its entire effort in the first fifteen days of shipping product in late 2008, and went on to exceed those initial projections (acquisition by Oracle notwithstanding). It should also be mentioned that Keith was a key engineer on this effort -- and its outsized commercial success was actually a triumph of systems thinking, not an example of its defeat. So yes, Sun failed -- but it was because it ultimately heeded systems thinking too little, not too much.[2] [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can-be-told/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033

tytso 12y ago
So how many total people were actually involved, over how many years? I probably shouldn't have said "engineering resources" --- what I meant was total headcount: technical writers, people to do the userspace tools, test engineers, engineers to do the performance tuning, etc. I mean the total headcount to get a fully functional, enterprise-ready production file system. What was the total number of person years? And when you say "paid for itself" in terms of the new line of products in 15 days of sales, were you talking about revenue, or profit? And did you subtract out not just the BOM costs, but also the costs of designing the new hardware, the costs of the commissions for the sales people / sales channel, the support costs (both the help desk and the sales engineers), etc? Given that I suspect (from doing research about how many PY's other companies have needed to get a fully production-ready, enterprise quality file system) it was at least 100 person years, and knowing what the typical profit margin on hardware tends to be, even a high-margin NAS box that was intended to compete with NetApp, please forgive me if I'm finding it a little hard to believe your numbers.
- bcantrill 12y ago
  Based on your questions, you obviously didn't know Sun or its engineering culture very well. The company's best work was done by outrageously small teams -- and its most regrettable done by absurdly large ones. Speaking for DTrace, everything was done by the three of us on the core team: we wrote 100% of the technical documentation (somewhat infamously, actually), we wrote the test suite, we wrote the test cases, we ran the alpha program, etc. I know it doesn't fit your narrative very well for DTrace to have been done by three people over the course of 23 months[1][2] -- especially when the Linux efforts to mimic it have floundered for so much longer than that -- but that's what it is. ZFS was larger than DTrace, but not by as much as you might thing -- and it was very small (as in, only Jeff and Matt) for a very long time. (The history there is public, and I don't particularly feel like doing your homework for you.) As for your question about paying for ourselves: I am (of course!) subtracting out COGS. Indeed, the product line was so immediately successful and profitable that it attracted the attention of one of its biggest customers as a potential acquirer -- but that's another story. Again, I know that it doesn't fit your narrative to have had small teams develop technologies that were both innovative and profitable, but that's what it is: ZFS and DTrace and Fishworks were examples of Sun at its best, not its worst -- and I don't think that that's a terribly controversial opinion... [1] http://dtrace.org/resources/bmc/houston.txt http://dtrace.org/resources/bmc/houston.txt [2] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/09/03/happy-5th-birthday-dtrace/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/09/03/happy-5th-birthday-dt...

tytso 12y ago

So how many total people were actually involved, over how many years? I probably shouldn't have said "engineering resources" --- what I meant was total headcount: technical writers, people to do the userspace tools, test engineers, engineers to do the performance tuning, etc. I mean the total headcount to get a fully functional, enterprise-ready production file system. What was the total number of person years? And when you say "paid for itself" in terms of the new line of products in 15 days of sales, were you talking about revenue, or profit? And did you subtract out not just the BOM costs, but also the costs of designing the new hardware, the costs of the commissions for the sales people / sales channel, the support costs (both the help desk and the sales engineers), etc? Given that I suspect (from doing research about how many PY's other companies have needed to get a fully production-ready, enterprise quality file system) it was at least 100 person years, and knowing what the typical profit margin on hardware tends to be, even a high-margin NAS box that was intended to compete with NetApp, please forgive me if I'm finding it a little hard to believe your numbers.

bcantrill 12y ago
Based on your questions, you obviously didn't know Sun or its engineering culture very well. The company's best work was done by outrageously small teams -- and its most regrettable done by absurdly large ones. Speaking for DTrace, everything was done by the three of us on the core team: we wrote 100% of the technical documentation (somewhat infamously, actually), we wrote the test suite, we wrote the test cases, we ran the alpha program, etc. I know it doesn't fit your narrative very well for DTrace to have been done by three people over the course of 23 months[1][2] -- especially when the Linux efforts to mimic it have floundered for so much longer than that -- but that's what it is. ZFS was larger than DTrace, but not by as much as you might thing -- and it was very small (as in, only Jeff and Matt) for a very long time. (The history there is public, and I don't particularly feel like doing your homework for you.) As for your question about paying for ourselves: I am (of course!) subtracting out COGS. Indeed, the product line was so immediately successful and profitable that it attracted the attention of one of its biggest customers as a potential acquirer -- but that's another story. Again, I know that it doesn't fit your narrative to have had small teams develop technologies that were both innovative and profitable, but that's what it is: ZFS and DTrace and Fishworks were examples of Sun at its best, not its worst -- and I don't think that that's a terribly controversial opinion... [1] http://dtrace.org/resources/bmc/houston.txt http://dtrace.org/resources/bmc/houston.txt [2] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/09/03/happy-5th-birthday-dtrace/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/09/03/happy-5th-birthday-dt...