

Today Was The Last Day of Sun Microsystems - VonGuard
http://www.sdtimes.com/blog/post/2009/07/16/The-End-of-Sun.aspx
Shareholders voted today to officially sell the company to Oracle. And Jonathan Schwartz wasn't even in the room when it happened.
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jf
Sun is gone, but they left behind an amazing collection of Open Source
Software: Java, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, VirtualBox.

I'll miss Sun and the amazing people I knew there.

~~~
old-gregg
Java never felt "new" to me: rather unnecessarily bloated and slow and not
offering enough high-level language features to justify the performance
penalty over C. Managing memory in C never felt "hard" and when I needed
something for quick hacking I could use VB and/or Delphi. Funny, but in many
ways Visual Basic has been far superior RAD tool for enterprise SQL pushing.
Yes, it was garbage-collected, ran in its own VM and produced fast-launching
executables.

In mid/late 90s words like "Oracle", "Sun", "Solaris" and "Java" were used
predominantly by older fat-faced salesmen types, while cool kids were coding C
on Windows or playing with Linux. Yes, Microsoft was fun back then: it felt
young, modern and innovative. Gates and Allen were Brin and Page of the 90s.

I was doing some cool real-time data acquisition/analytics on Windows NT with
C++ and MFC. Yes, it felt bad-ass. In my geek circles Borland was considered
the most exciting software company at the time. Sun/Oracle and IBM with OS/2?
Those were for banks and GM.

Sun hasn't changed since then. I have nothing to thank this company for,
except that with Java, they dumbed down our profession to nearly data-entry
status and introduced an intolerable boredom to the world of software hacking,
something it was missing before 1995. I also believe Java suppressed the
development and widespread adoption of Lisp, Smalltalk, ML and Haskell: before
Java lots of folks couldn't use them because computers weren't powerful
enough, but now they aren't using them because schools stopped teaching and
switched to vocational java training.

I wasn't surprised Oracle bought them. Their "Oracle Forms" BS always sucked.
With Java and armies of school-trained drones supplemented by Indian
outsourcers they finally have a wonderful distribution channel to keep pushing
their overpriced stuff through. I guess SAP could buy them too. I've been
fortunate enough to avoid this market, so I won't be missing anything.

~~~
TJensen
I think you've got some causality messed up. I don't see how Java could have
"dumbed down our profession." I think instead, schools turning vocational
reduced the caliber of graduates while simultaneously pumping out large
quantities of them.

It could have happened with just about any language. Java just happened to
have a lot of things going for it that made it fit perfectly into the mold
those vocational schools were looking for: simple memory management, platform
abstraction, included libraries, and a large marketing effort creating jobs.

I remember when I was excited about Java. I was writing software for multiple
platforms, and the thought of a write once, run everywhere was awesome. I felt
so raped when it turned out to be a lie. I was so young and naive. :)

Now, I wish Java had never belched from the bowels of that leviathan. Even
worse, I'm working at a game company, building an MMO, and using Java. Egads!

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jeremymims
This was the real success of Linux. It didn't take over the consumer desktop
market, but it sure decimated the need for specialty servers and proprietary
server operating systems.

Once Sun was forced to compete in the commodity hardware market, it was over.

~~~
jhugbj
Still they outlasted, DEC, SGI, Pyramid and all the other
minicomputer/workstation makers.

~~~
10ren
Yes, Sun and Digital (DEC) got killed by the same thing - Clayton Christensen
on Digital (not Sun):

 _Every disruption has three components to it: a technological enabler, a
business model innovation and a new commercial ecosystem. In computing, the
technological enabler of disruption in computing was the microprocessor. It so
simplified the design of a computer that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs could
just slap one together in a garage. It transformed the industry’s fundamental
technological problem—the design of a computer—from a problem that took
hundreds of people several years to solve into one that was much simpler._

 _Then that simplifying technology had to be married with a business model
that could take the technology into the market in a cost-effective and
convenient way. Digital Equipment Corp. had microprocessor technology, but its
business model could not profitably sell a computer for less than $50,000. The
technology trapped in a high-cost business model had no impact on the world,
and in fact, the world ultimately killed Digital. But IBM Corp., with the very
same processors at its disposal, set up a different business model in Florida
that could make money at a $2,000 price point and 20% gross margins—and
changed the world. It’s a combination of the technology and business model
that makes formerly complicated, expensive, inaccessible things affordable and
accessible._

[http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache%3Asloanreview.mit.edu%2...](http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache%3Asloanreview.mit.edu%2Fthe-
magazine%2Farticles%2F2009%2Fspring%2F50314%2Fgood-days-for-
disruptors%2F+%22every%20disruption%20has%20three%20components%20to%20it%22)

~~~
sahaj
"It’s a combination of the technology and business model that makes formerly
complicated, expensive, inaccessible things affordable and accessible."

this reminds me of google. they are essentially providing what used to be
complicated and expensive tools at a much lower cost.

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spitfire
Such a shame. They made fantastic products but just couldn't keep up the pace
as time went on.

~~~
adharmad
They could not sell those products.

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Musashi
This is sad... They used to be a damned good company with good techies.

~~~
quisxt
...but absolutely terrible leadership that couldn't figure out where they
wanted to go, or how to get there and ended up going nowhere.

~~~
access_denied
The same applies to Commodore.

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ramoq
can't help but feel down. i really enjoy developing in java :(

~~~
timcederman
You think Java will be discontinued?

~~~
schizoidboy
I doubt it because IBM has too much skin in the game. Few people are aware,
but IBM produces its own JDK:

<https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/>

~~~
davidw
For that matter, the Apache Software Foundation has a Java implementation
called 'Harmony', although I'm not sure they're allowed to call it Java.

~~~
brianm
That is a sadly long and storied history, which Stephen Colebourne describes
best:

[http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/sun_apache_ip_in_pi...](http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/sun_apache_ip_in_pictures)

There is some hope that the legal shenanigans will stop once ORCL finishes
taking ownership of JAVA.

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andeka
Sun - The stanford university network.

~~~
jingsong
Bill Joy was from Berkeley though.

~~~
ucdaz
It was two Stanford guys and one Berkeley dude. 2 Votes for Stanford Univ
Networks 1 Vote for UC Berekeley Networks

Bill Joy: "$%^&! I want it to be called UCBN! It has a better ring to it! No?"

~~~
dmv
Or given Sun's history with big endian: NBCU!

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datums
Today I was reading about Bill Joy in Outliers.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy> I wonder about the future of MySQL.

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bitwize
What will become of SPARC?

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jong
So long and thanks for all the fish

