3 ms·

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 headcou

by 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...

by tytso 12y ago

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...