alt Hacker NewsI seriously don't know what Sun could have done to survive - once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.
Replies
Sun clearly suffered some from being a bit too early to what would become cloud computing —- didn’t help that their tagline was “the network is the computer”, which IMO was a bit too obtuse, because I didn’t really understand what it meant (sounded like a violation of the 7-layer OSI model lol) until I saw actual cloud computing come about.
But as some sibling comments indicate they already had a lot of the software infra for distributed computing the way it eventually came to be done today, with SOA/microservices, service discovery, or serverless lambdas etc. via frameworks like EJB or JXTA. They were admittedly pretty cumbersome, like the contemporary equivalents COM/DCOM, and made the fundamental mistake of trying to abstract away the fallacies of distributed computing, but also solved most of the common problems involved.
Potentially they could have pivoted to monetizing that software infra even if it got deployed on arbitrary hardware, which may have tided them over until they could spin up their own cloud service, even if it was a fast follow to AWS. However Sun seemed committed to making their expensive servers their primary business model and relegated the software to “loss leader” complements.
If they had just looked at how services were being developed on Linux + commodity servers, they’d have seen they already had offerings in that space that could be monetized.
They should have seen commodity hardware coming and built cheaper hardware themselves. They could have. Other companies were making clone Spark machines for much less so it would have been possible.
Early Linux distros were very rough. Remember messing around with modelines in X11 configs?
Sun could've been the "Apple" of x86 Unix: it just works.
With the benefit of perfect hindsight, which is a bit silly?
Open source Solaris as early as possible.
Really compete with MIPS, ARM, Motorola, etc. in the embedded space. Don't even try to make it a huge financial win, just get the SPARC architecture and dev tools out there with good Linux support.
Consistently support Solaris x86 and frequently release new generations of Intel and AMD workstation-class hardware.
Partner with TSMC for SPARC production a lot earlier.
Since we're just having fun here: acquire Nvidia in 1999, at which time it was pretty obvious workstation graphics was going to be commodified, and Sun could have bought them with their pocket change.
Exactly, I used desktop Sun machines and administered many very large Sun machines from 1997 through to 2010.
I saw the end coming for Sun when I had a dx2/66 at home running Linux in the late 90s. It was brilliant.
I've never spent much time with Sun equipment, but the hardware and OS had features I haven't seen on commodity hardware with Linux. IIRC, Solaris could deal with an unrecoverable ECC error by killing the process that had the bad memory. And I think they had hot swap memory on some systems.
ZFS was pretty unrivaled for long term storage for a long time. Solaris zones were containers before they were cool. Dtrace is pretty neat. Etc.
Maybe they could have survived with their OpenSolaris push driving low end adoption and high end customers buying their hardware. Pretty sure they would have had to migrate to x86, but they were dabling in that.
Maybe make some low end commodity x86 servers. Sell enterprise a fully engineered big ass database server and a bunch of commodity web servers. Doesn't have to be exceptionally priced, just good enough to let customers have single vendor server purchasing instead of getting the big stuff from sun and the little stuff from dell or hp.
More systems consulting? Sun had great engineers, but you don't see too many war stories about them fixing stuff for customers (maybe they keep quiet though).