Sun's Fatal Flaw: Boredom with Business

I've written several times here about all the mistakes that Sun made during the 00s that doomed it. Among the many mistakes it made are:

- Cancelling -if briefly- Solaris on x86 in 2002. This killed Solaris in the minds of many who didn't want to be locked into Sun for SPARC.

- Failing to make a deal with Google in 2002. Apparently Sun insisted on knowing how many servers Google had, something that Google considered a high-value secret, so Sun failed to make a deal with Google, so Google ended up using Linux and contributing to Linux. This was a tremendous mind-share disaster -- it's hard to overestimate the damage done by this.

- Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.

- Not giving up on J2ME earlier -- it's not the sort of thing that could last forever, and Steve Jobs killed it with the iPhone. This was a case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making.

- Failure to recognize that Sun needed to become a systems company, not a CPU company.

- Failure to respond to Active Directory. This was yet another case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making: the Sun DS product team was milking their existing customers more than they wanted to go after more business with a sustainable strategy.

- UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison.

- Failure to make a deal with Apple for i […]

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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 […]

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.

I think the most important thing Sun got wrong was having no credible onboarding path for new clients. Why would someone invest in SPARC and Solaris when a generic x86 with Linux would do 99% of what the SPARC box would do, for far less? Why would someone who is developing their software on an x86 box with Linux care about deploying it to SPARC+Solaris? Or SPARC+Linux? Or x86+Solaris? There is a huge advantage in deploying to the same platform you develop for, which means, not having a credible desktop will hurt you in the long run.

The same applies to IBM's POWER and Z - how many green field projects are being built for them? Apart from weirdos (such as myself) who is even interested in that? And even then, I will not suggest building anything new on AIX or z/OS, or Linux on either, unless there is a really compelling (such as "we got the hardware for free", or "we really need instruction-cycle latencies to run inference and we can't match that with any other NPU") reason.

Don't get me wrong - I love using uncommon hardware with uncommon OSs (which expose bugs that are affected by endianness, or Linuxisms, or blindly assuming a string is ASCII, or that a file stays put while you use it).

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.