
What killed Sun Microsystems? - ImFrostbyte
http://hxxbit.vinci.cloud/2016/06/08/whatkilledsun/
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hxxbit
Please note that this was before my link switch. Please go to
[http://hxxbit.vinci.cloud/2016/07/08/whatkilledsun/](http://hxxbit.vinci.cloud/2016/07/08/whatkilledsun/)

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ChuckMcM
Pretty perceptive for a 13 yr old.

I was at Sun from the day they went public until the launch of Java, I saw
things a bit more clearly. When Sun started they were building workstations
using Motorola's 68010 series of chips. They had taken an open source OS
(4.xBSD) and a commodity microprocessor (68K) and put together some really
nice hardware and made sure all the drivers worked and all of the software
interfaces were consistent. Their two fiercest competitors at the time were
DEC with its VAXStation line (custom CPU (VAX), custom OS (VMS)), and Apollo
with its Domain line (commodity CPU (68k), custom OS (Domain)). It gave you
almost the perfect Petri dish for evaluating the strategy.

It worked well, Sun out engineered all other workstation companies and by 1990
was at the top of its game.

The first thing that started eating at it was Silicon Graphics, the focus on
serious graphics hardware got them into places where Sun was weak. The second
thing was the slow ponderous rise of the x86 architecture. It wasn't until the
386 that there was realistically a competitor to the old 68K dominance in 32
bit machines. And the Pentium was the first architecture that could go head to
head with SPARC on the low end.

At the top of its game Sun made three bad decisions, that ultimately sealed
its fate. First it decided to make its OS more "enterprise" and got into a
huge deal with AT&T to "merge" all the UNIXes into one happy System V. Second
it decided that it could build a better CPU than semiconductor companies and
embarked on building SPARC. And finally, when x86 machines started developing
the same capabilities as workstations (and brought Windows NT along with
them), it chose to retreat into the "datacenter" rather than continue to work
and learn in deskop space.

All of the advantages of its early days had been reversed, it had a
proprietary OS (Solaris), a proprietary CPU (SPARC), and it charged premium
margins (even though they were not sustainable). I emailed Scott McNealy and
suggested he sell off SPARC to Fujitsu, sunset Solaris in favor of a new
version of SunOS based on the FreeBSD kernel, and engineer machines out of
commodity chips (x86 and Opteron). They did much of that (except the SunOS
part) but it was much too late and the rest of the organization was
hemorrhaging money.

Even today I think that could be a credible business plan although I note that
folks like System76 haven't been nearly as successful as the early Sun. I'm
not sure if that is that they don't engineer _enough_ of the systems or if
they don't have the staff to really do the drivers they need. Or it could just
be that crappy driver support and flakey window systems are the new normal and
not enough people remember not rebooting for 6 months.

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orionblastar
Sun not adapting to market changes. Who wants a Solaris SPARC box if a X86 PC
with Linux is cheaper?

Remember the network computer Sun made with Java OS that was supposed to take
on Microsoft? Nobody wanted one.

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ImFrostbyte
I think that this is pretty interesting. It seems like Sun couldn't keep up
with Linux. but still screw java adware

