Having read a lot of these things from ex-Sun employees, I dearly want to read one with the topic my department is the one that fucked up Sun. I don't think I have seen a topic like that yet.

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bcantrill an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I actually haven't read a ton of these, so would love to be pointed to what you have found. But yes, everyone will be biased, and I am too. I think that the organization that I was in fucked up plenty (when I joined the company in 1996, SunSoft was led by truly one of the most incompetent executives I have ever encountered, a bumbling oaf that Sun kept putting in charge of different business units, letting him asphyxiate them one by one), but the fact that everyone also sees something else wrong probably tells you a few things: everyone at Sun earnestly wanted the company to succeed; Sun did a bunch of stuff right; Sun did a bunch of other stuff wrong.

Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome -- and I think it's pretty telling that Sun's executive leadership basically went on to do more or less nothing after Sun. I loved Sun -- but it was a breeding ground for engineers, not executive leadership.

	▲	justin66 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm reluctant to call anyone out. I liked Sun a lot, as well as the people I've encountered who worked there. There was a thread between a couple of ex-Sun guys here on hn years ago - I can't find it right now - which made me feel there was a humorous and very human pattern in Sun postmortem comments: "man, that other team really killed Sun, we were doomed after that thing they did." I was pretty curious what the people on that other team (the SPARC microprocessor designers, in the case of that comment thread) might have said in their own defense, where they might have spread some of the blame, and so on. (perhaps it doesn't do your rather full blog post justice to compare it to something considerably less complete like a comment thread) > Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome I emphatically agree. Maybe it goes without saying but with Sun, multiple generations of leadership, I think.

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jhbadger an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I seriously don't know what Sun could have done to survive - once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.

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toast0 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I've never spent much time with Sun equipment, but the hardware and OS had features I haven't seen on commodity hardware with Linux. IIRC, Solaris could deal with an unrecoverable ECC error by killing the process that had the bad memory. And I think they had hot swap memory on some systems.

ZFS was pretty unrivaled for long term storage for a long time. Solaris zones were containers before they were cool. Dtrace is pretty neat. Etc.

Maybe they could have survived with their OpenSolaris push driving low end adoption and high end customers buying their hardware. Pretty sure they would have had to migrate to x86, but they were dabling in that.

Maybe make some low end commodity x86 servers. Sell enterprise a fully engineered big ass database server and a bunch of commodity web servers. Doesn't have to be exceptionally priced, just good enough to let customers have single vendor server purchasing instead of getting the big stuff from sun and the little stuff from dell or hp.

More systems consulting? Sun had great engineers, but you don't see too many war stories about them fixing stuff for customers (maybe they keep quiet though).

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bluGill an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They should have seen commodity hardware coming and built cheaper hardware themselves. They could have. Other companies were making clone Spark machines for much less so it would have been possible.

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icedchai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Early Linux distros were very rough. Remember messing around with modelines in X11 configs?

Sun could've been the "Apple" of x86 Unix: it just works.

	▲	gjvc 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm willing to bet they couldn't have done that because of the mind-boggling array of 1990s UNIX standards Solaris seemed to support. By the mid 1990s it was clear that the (platform-independent) GNU command line tools were generally superior to what was on Solaris, but presumably they had to keep all the old fossils around to satisfy their long-standing supply / support contracts with industry, defence, and government. That was my guess back then, and it's my guess now. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong and you know for certain why.

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bluGill an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That doesn't exist. No department is every completely at fault. No department has enough budget to sink a company alone. It is always a lot of departments that don't turn in expected results - often for reasons not in their control.

The fault is always upper management not doing their job. Even if one department really would be that bad (which again they are not), upper management allowed them to be that bad.