

How Apple Dodged a Sun Buyout - hornokplease
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/How-Apple-Dodged-a-Sun-Buyout-Former-CEOs-McNealy-Zander-Tell-All-251679/

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bediger
Interesting view of how Linux would have worked out, had Sun done the right
things with x86 processors.

But this strikes me as denying Sun's position, as per Clayton Christensen's
"Innovator's Dilemma". Sun passed on a number of opportunities for disruptive
innovation. For example, the folks who started Auspex came from Sun, I think
(and in turn, Auspex missed the boat that took Network Appliances away). Sun
had a processor that was pretty darn good, when intel released the 80386.
Let's face it, SPARC architecture still makes a lot more sense than x86. And
Sun kept up for a surprisingly long time. How many people did Intel have
squirrelling away at the x86 architecture? How many people did Sun have on
SPARC? I imagine it was 10x less.

I think suggesting that Solaris could have taken the place of linux in the
market is very much wishful thinking. Now, if Sun had listened to Larry
McVoy's Sourceware Operating System Proposal in '93
(<http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html>), that might have made a big
difference.

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gamble
I agree. Sun was dependent on selling proprietary hardware at $20k a pop. Even
if they had launched a commodity-hardware line, no one would have paid the
prices necessary to support a corporate structure built on high-end sales. SGI
tried, and it didn't go so well for them.

~~~
kjhghj
Sun didn't even need an expensive salesforce to sell them - we were a
government research customer in the 90s and had all our orders for Ultra
sparcs cancelled - Wall St were paying above list price for any that Sun could
build

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cellularmitosis
Assuming that google would be running on solaris "if only we had..." strikes
me as being a bit myopic. I think it's more likely they'd be running on
freebsd.

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metageek
Talking through his hat on a couple of these. Netscape was not open source,
and there's a huge gap between distributed computing and cloud computing.

~~~
kjhghj
sun did have an early grid computing system - it was academic access only and
based on RPC but all the bits were there

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patrickgzill
Sun never committed to the low-end. Their sales droids wanted to sell to the
enterprise and big .edu .

Of course, now Linux is what enterprise and big .edu are running... I am told
that Solaris has a tenacious hold on certain financial shops and banking, and
other niches as well.

It is a shame, their $995-list 1U servers (V100, Netra X1) use only 70W
including powering 2 hard drives. Had they kept up and released a follow-on
series with SATA and more RAM expandability, they would be perfect for cloud
applications.

