

How Sun's need to control the code cost them the company - ukdm
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31418&tag=bitly

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hga
As far as I could tell perhaps the #1 Sun died was fantastically inept
management, most especially in sales:

Sun just wouldn't talk to you directly if you weren't buying mainframe levels
($$$) of hardware. At some point they established a site where you could punch
in your credit card, but if you needed more you were at the mercy of their
"VARs" and resellers, who in far too many cases also wouldn't give you the
time of day (note this was CPU agnostic, it was true for their x86 hardware
according to the stories below and for SPARC hardware in my personal
experience).

A little quality time with a search engine will find stories from all sorts of
startups upset that they were forced to buy Dell since Dell actually wanted to
sell stuff to them in any quantity (at the same time HP's sales function was
also messed up in different ways).

So Sun missed out on all the startups that became really big; by the time
these companies were buying in mainframe quantities Sun was just a bad memory.

One thing that I noticed happening later was companies dropping Sun because
their hardware kept changing. In one case they dropped a great discrete Intel
Ethernet chip in favor of the ones on the nVidia chipset, in another, they
kept changing the management interface. (A bit like one of the things that
hurt Compaq, you could buy many copies of the same model, yet adjacent serial
numbers might have totally different motherboards.)

It's no accident that Sun's sales organization seems to be where Oracle is
making the biggest quickest changes (hiring thousands of salesmen as I
recall).

ADDED THOUGHT: I don't think the thesis in the linked article flies. As I see
it, it posits that if Sun had done a (much) better job with open source, the
business gained from that could have covered for their failures elsewhere.

Better, I say, to have fixed both sets of failures.

~~~
nradov
What you're describing is a classic case of channel conflict. The same problem
largely killed off several CAD software vendors back in the day. It was also
one of the key reasons why Novell's NetWare business failed after being highly
profitable for years.

~~~
hga
Isn't this more like "channel incompetence" than channel conflict? My
understanding of channel conflict is that it happens when manufacturers
disintermediate their channel partners by selling directly to customers (which
is exactly what it seems Oracle will be doing now).

What Sun did was to fail to police their channel partners and confirm that
they would actually sell intermediate quantities of equipment; I know that
throughout the '90s it was extremely difficult for me to buy single Sun SPARC
systems (workstations and servers), and as noted in my original message too
many startups found it _impossible_ to buy six figures worth of systems.

I assume their partners understood that Sun handled the really big purchases
(maybe they got a piece of the action???) and that the only conflict was when
Sun set up their web storefront for the small purchases a customer could put
on a credit card.

------
johnohara
_The difference between Sun systems and everything else out there in the late
1980’s (mostly Novell Netware or Microsoft LAN Manager networks) is that Sun
networks just worked, all the time._

Ugh, not quite. I installed and configured an early version of DECNet-PC
(ultimately renamed PathWorks) on a 4-node Vax 8650 cluster in late 1986 that
networked three Epson PC's over ethernet to a common virtual DOS drive mapped
on an RA81. It was solid as a rock, behaved itself well, and easily shared
files for WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase.

An early Netware (2.11?) network had been setup three floors above us to show
the power of 'client-server' computing. It crashed at least 5 times daily when
it finally would run and its unreliability got two of my co-workers fired
because they couldn't make Novell's empty promises work.

Lan Manager? Late 1980's? Are you kidding?

Sun started by unseating DEC in the scientific desktop market with their
"workstations," not their network.

Just look at the nodes on maps of the early ARPANet if you don't believe me.
PDP's, VAX's and mainframes.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arpnet-map-march-1977.png>.

When Scott McNealey announced that the "network was the system" he was taking
direct aim at DEC whose installed systems already made up the world's largest
collection of networked computers and pc's, were clustered to 16 nodes and
more, offered full load balancing, were tied to gigs and gigs of storage using
high-speed teflon interconnects and routinely ran 200 days and more without a
restart.

Don't get me wrong, Unix/NFS was nice, but it needed a lot more work to
compete with DEC, VAX/VMS and Ultrix. What prevented DEC from eating Sun's
lunch was it's insistence on centralized computing using terminals. Had they
fully understood what they had in DECNet-PC back in 1986 there never would
have been a need for Novell, or Banyan Vines, or WFW 3.11 or any of the other
wannabe's and Sun's "networked desktop workstation" would have been a much
more difficult sell.

Here's the spec for a VMS filename circa 1985: NODE "accountname
password"::device:[directory.subdirectory]filename.type;ver

Here's a typical EDT (text editor) command: $ edt orion"system
somepwd"::dua0:[sysfiles.configs]mylog.txt;4

Meaning: Use the text editor "edt" to open version "4" of the file named
"mylog.txt" that's located in the "configs" directory under the root directory
named "sysfiles" on drive "0" attached to disk unit "a" on the node named
"orion". Log me in using the "system" account with password "somepwd."

From anywhere in the world as long as it's on the network.

Everytime I configure Samba I think about those Epson PC's.

------
kmavm
It is hilarious to me that the Linux community continues to retell the "Have
you ever kissed a girl?" chestnut after 14 years, and still fails to get the
joke.

If you go back and read the original Usenet (not email) drama
(<http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html>), it is Miller who
sounds like an adolescent. From describing himself as "chief architect of the
SparcLinux port," to the laughable wishful thinking of "Linux is light weight,
Solaris is a pig," to the non-sequitur cheapshot of "Sun Quentin" (what is
that supposed to mean? that Sun engineers are held against their will? that
they're felons? what?), the entire post drips of the naive self-regard that,
sadly, marked Linux's kernel community at the time.

I was regularly using both systems in 1996. Solaris worked. Linux did not.
Miller was asking to be taken down several notches, and Cantrill did so in the
fewest possible syllables.

~~~
kls
Man reading that reminded me of why I disliked Linux and all of the "hackers"
in that space at that time. The adolescent smugness was so thick back then.
That email really took me back. OS zealotry seems to have died down since
then, that or I have just gotten too old to care or notice.

~~~
fnid2
It's still a religious debate. I just talked about it with a professor in the
field and he refuses to have a conversation about OS with other similar folks
due to the lack of rationality in the debate.

------
rbanffy
I think a confusing hardware lineup, confusing messages and overall confusing
strategy have a whole lot more to do with its merger than any compulsion to
control code.

Their tech is great. Their management not so.

And I don't believe in untenable situations.

------
10ren
Sun was primarily a hardware company and that's where “The Innovator’s
Dilemma” is applicable.

The PC killed them.

~~~
protomyth
Yet Apple survives and thrives. Sun wasn't really a hardware company or a
software company. That was the problem, it seemed they really didn't know what
they wanted to be, so they tried to be everything and failed.

~~~
lucifer
Apple counterpoint is right on the "money". Apple was having quite a lot of
problems before wunderkind returned.

This is obviously hindsight, but imagine:

It is early 90s, you are the company that goes by the motto "the network is
the computer", and you have this incredibly hot tech called Java that can run
on any tier. A bit later and your JME is on _billions_ of mobile devices all
over the world.

A Steve Jobs type of leader would have been able to leverage that amazing
potential. And the transformation would have been as decisive as Apple's.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac> to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone>

The gods must be laughing as key failure here was the abysmal execution of a
tech called the "applet".

~~~
10ren
Yes, Sun's inability to execute in consumer markets appears in the failure of
applets against flash. And it would also prevent them from creating something
like an iPhone.

It seems that just about all current success stories in computing are in
consumer markets: search, social websites, smartphones.

It's true that Oracle is doing well and they aren't in consumer markets - but
their market is not showing rapid growth; on the contrary, they are actively
consolidating it.

~~~
lucifer
And I guess the business lesson here is to learn to spot dissonance in your
business strategy.

Sun engaged the consumer market with propaganda. That was the extent of their
engagement. (Remember all those Sun ads during the dotcom bubble?)

But in reality, Sun was in reality only engaging geeks. Sun has never failed
as a company catering to geeks.

Somebody in that company should have noted that their desire (Sun for the
masses) and their actions (Sun for techies) were not congruent.

Proof is in the fact that in the case where the general public has little
input - the backend -- Sun was (and remains) spectacularly successful. The
mistakes made here are far less specific to Sun, and very much related to the
dissonance between being in business to make money and being enlightened
hippies who are making substantial contributions to the industry, for free.

