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 -- an

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...