I guess I rephrase: they didn't do any of the distributed systems stuff necessary for the cloud if people so desperately want to call all the network stuff they did "distributed systems". Technically they were distributed systems, sure, just like anything client-server, but irrelevant to the challenges of fault tolerant geographically distributed asynchronously communicating systems.
... Does this statement come from having actually used things like Hadoop on Sun Grid Engine or any of Sun's other products? Or... what? What knowledge are you drawing on?
Edit: I mean, this is the company that gave us the 8 Fallacies of distributed computing, as they were 20yrs ago
I completely disagree, see my comment above. I was doing asynchronous distributed data replication and compute over a grid in 2001 using Jini and Javaspaces, and I was the one late to the party.
So old broken networking tech (Jini and Javaspaces) over a fast reliable local network (a grid) in 2001. How could this knowledge help anyone with fault tolerance, high-availability, partitioning/sharding, CAP consistency/availability trade offs, etc., which internet companies at the time were figuring out?
> Sun Microsystems literally invented geoclustering!
They didn't. Not that any of it is important anyway. All 80s and early 90s networking tech was ridiculously broken, which should be obvious, since distributed systems field was just born at that time (first papers in like 1978). Things started to get useful only by the end of nineties. But by that time Sun's tech was nowhere near anything internet companies were doing. So later when things got to infrastructure Sun's engineering was really really behind, they had to start from scratch on anything that internet companies were learning and doing for many years. And this was very different time consuming knowledge, not something where someone could use their OS level expertise. Which also makes it very hard to compete with companies that are much farther ahead, especially with this silly "our tech is the greatest" attitude making it hard to even realize how far behind you actually were.
Sun Microsystems was the #1 computer company by revenue at the end of '90's. Everybody ran their hardware and Solaris; that's where the slogan we're the dot in .com came from, because it was true. If you had been around for it, you'd know it. Your comments date you...