
Why Sun Microsystems Failed - profitbaron
http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229300003
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steveb
IMHO from a large-enterprise perspective:

1) A failure to execute. They were increasingly unable to compete in the high-
end UNIX server market against IBM. The Rock processor was constantly delayed.
Their machines fell behind in performance, Solaris was harder to manage and
less stable than AIX.

2) Inability to capitalize on their inventions. IBM used Java as a common
language across all of their enterprise platforms, they sold Websphere as a
common application platform. NetApp was able to build a large business off
NFS.

3) Linux/Intel got a lot better on the low end, Sun could not give a good
reason why their platform was worth the additional cost. Usually when you are
disrupted on the low end, you move upmarket, but due to 1) they were unable to
take this path.

4) Muddled strategy: they dabbled in a lot of things-storage, office suites,
mysql, etc. It was hard to tell if they loved or hated open source at times.
They spent years battling Microsoft in the press. They had 2-3 different
virtualization technologies. Some of the best Fake Steve Jobs posts are when
he ripped into Sun.

5) Even if they were able to execute, their niche was becoming less viable. A
mid-tier hardware manufacturer using a proprietary operating system is not a
good position to be in. They did not have the deep enterprise roots and
consulting business that IBM has, nor a massive install base like Linux or
Windows.

~~~
Isamu
I buy that. Especially the muddled strategy and disappearing niche. Much
better than the article.

They were losing money for years - it shouldn't have come as a surprise to
anyone.

In particular I never understood what their Java strategy was. Or rather, how
they were expecting to make real money with it. I only saw one weak gesture
after another, after all that massive hype.

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Udo
The featured comment is way more insightful than the actual article:

 _The NETWORK is the computer, remember? Sun lost track of this reality. They
were a systems company, yes, with emphasis on the hardware devices business
rather than software. Lack of focus on software was not the cause of Sun's
downfall. It was that they lost the vision of systems evolution in the
NETWORK. Systems are now on a chip, in a hand held smart device that is mobile
with access to apps. in the data center or cloud over the NETWORK. Sun
understood this in its early years, but lost track of the trend later on,
lured into selling "big iron" and mired in the status quo. Furthermore, Sun
was a bloated company that refused to make staffing cuts when necessary. Sun
was blinded by Sun._ [sseiden920]

~~~
InclinedPlane
Seems as though they lacked the courage of their convictions and held onto a
business strategy that was diametrically opposite to their vision.

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dedward
When I tried to buy about a half-million dollars in gear from them one time
(through suppliers, of course), rather than simply delivering it, they tracked
their suppliers, put a hold on ALL suppliers doing business with us, had their
internal sales guy call me directly, make me an offer higher than the others
were offerring me, and hten kept trying to upsell me on more services. It took
me a month to get a quote, 3 months to get an order, and by then the project
was cancelled so we didn't buy.

I was astonished. Nothing wrong with upselling - but here I was, a guy who
LIKED sun gear, with cash ready to go, and a product list, the easiest sale in
the world - not that big, and for some reason sun had to get all involved and
screw themselves out of the sale.

When someone comes to you knowing exactly what they want, ready to pay, SHIP
IT TO THEM!

It's no surprise they failed.

~~~
adrianwaj
This sounds more like kidnap-ransom than sales to me.

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stretchwithme
"Used car salesmen, with their goods at least visible to the naked eye, are
paragons of virtue compared to software salesmen."

I've known a few of both and have to say this really isn't true. Virtue pays
off when there is a relationship and I can't imagine having a business
relationship with a used car salesman.

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wtn
"Different isn't always better, but better is always different." -- My
roommate's Sun Microsystems coffee mug

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goalieca
I never noticed this before, but eclipse blocks out the sun.

~~~
redthrowaway
First time I put that together, too. If that was truly IBM's intention, then I
love it for its subtlety.

~~~
nailer
There's a few cases where app developers have done this:

\- Caldera's made the first graphical Linux installer, called 'Lizard'. Red
Hat's competitor was called 'Anaconda' because anacondas eat lizards.

\- Some angry Ruby people made an app called 'Fuzed' because they didn't like
Zed Shaw.

~~~
redthrowaway
"Fuzed" is fantastic. Also, I can sympathize.

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bcantrill
I don't indulge in the SUNW autopsy parlor game often, but coincidentally,
I've already played it twice today (for the first time in many months), and
I'm waiting on a build -- so perhaps the third time's a charm...

Disclaimer: I was one of the ones who tried like hell to right the ship. So I
am not only suffering from the same hindsight bias that everyone else will
inevitably suffer from, I am further biased by the lens of my own actions and
experience.

That said, I think Sun's problem was pretty simple: we thought we were a
hardware company long after it should have been clear that we were a systems
company. As a result, we made overpriced, underperforming (and, it kills me to
say, unreliable) hardware. And because we were hardware-fixated, we did not
understand the economic disruptive force of either Intel or open source until
it was too late. (Believe me that some of us understood this: I worked
extensively on both Solaris x86 and with the SPARC microprocessor teams -- and
I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were
starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.)

Now to be honest, I (and others on the software side) played a role in
enabling bad hardware behavior: we spent too much time trying to help save
microprocessor management from an unmitigated disaster of their own creation
(UltraSPARC-III, cruelly code named "Cheetah") when we should have been more
forcefully advocating cutting them off. Personally, I feel I only started to
really help the company turnaround when I refused to continue to enable it: I
(and we, really) stopped trying to save the hardware teams from themselves,
and focussed on delivering innovative systems software. And indeed, the
software that resulted from that focus bought the company time and (I
believed) an opportunity for renaissance: when coupled with the return of Andy
and the open sourcing of Solaris, there was reason for great optimism around
2005 or so...

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough. One could argue that our technological pivots
were too late, and they may well have been, but I think that the urgency and
focus that we felt in the engine room (aided by the bone-cold water that was
at our knees and rising) was simply not felt or appreciated in the wheelhouse:
I feel that we could have made it had there been more interest at the top of
Sun in the mechanics of running and managing a multi-billion dollar
business...

Or maybe it's not so unfortunate: thanks to the fact that we open sourced the
system, I still get to work everyday on the technology that I devoted my
career to -- and I'm loving it more than ever, and having more fun developing
it than I have in a long, long time. (And, it must be said, I'm working with
many of the same engineers that made working at Sun great.)

So when I look back on those years, I believe it will ultimately be with
fondness, not regret; for me personally, Scott nailed it: "Kicked Butt, Had
Fun, Didn’t Cheat, Loved Our Customers, Changed Computing Forever."

~~~
credo
_> > we did not understand the economic disruptive force of either Intel or
open source until it was too late._

I find your comment about open-source confusing

My sense is that (a) Sun was a hardware company and (b) they were obsessed
with beating Microsoft (a software company)

One of their strategies to beat Microsoft was to commoditize software. It is
possible that many Sun employees also developed an ideological affinity
towards open-source, but imo their move to embrace open-source was a
deliberate business strategy to commoditize software. Ultimately Sun failed,
but it wasn't because they didn't understand open-source

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teyc
(This article reminds me of Nokia, whose software divisions must have suffered
at the hands of hardware-dominated managers.)

Solaris x86 could have been a viable challenger to Red Hat had it been open
sourced and free. Unfortunately, the presence of Linux-as-a-movement and IBM's
backing meant that Solaris's success was far from assured. A movement is like
an earthquake. By the time the earth is shaking it is already too late.

Java did well on the server-side, but Java on the client-side left a big
vacuum which Adobe proceeded fill. I remembered the early days of AWT where
the demos ran better on Microsoft's JVM than on Sun's JVM. Sun Java was far
from performant then. Meanwhile, Swing was designed to look good on Solaris
but is pretty much alien-looking on Windows. It was excruciatingly slow in the
early days. I remembered how refreshingly fast SWT ran on Eclipse 1.0.

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guelo
The only way any of the great Unix companies survived Linux was by massively
pivoting away from the Big Iron. HP moved into PCs and printers and IBM into
consulting. Sun was the last one really giving it a go, valiant effort, but
they were never able to find a new market to move into.

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adrianwaj
In McNealy's admission, Sun underestimated 32 bit and thought everyone was
moving to 64 bit. Maybe they under and over estimated the price/performance
ratios of the two, and overlooked the importance of clustered server farms
running Linux.

CPUs aren't like engines, and servers aren't like cars. Cars can't be tied
together, and not everyone wants or needs a sports car.

