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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

>Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it.

Sun had excellent engineers but no adults in the room focused on selling the tech or making money. They got drunk off the dotbomb cash influx. They saw that they needed to open source Solaris to properly compete with Linux (and arguably they weren't too late) - but they didn't actually have a plan to make MONEY off that. You can't both give away all your software while simultaneously trying to switch to x86 hardware at the time when x86 had already become a race to the bottom...

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The E10K -- the former Cray Business Systems Division purchased from SGI for a pittance -- made $1.2B in its first year as a product, and probably still stands as one of the most profitable acquisitions in the history of the industry. (And was due entirely to the adults in the room.) Yes, Sun was badly disrupted by x86 -- but not being able to adapt to economic disruption is really not the same as not being able to "figure out how to make people pay for it." (Indeed, those most fixated on immediate revenue are those for whom economic disruption is most difficult to counter.)

To be clear: Sun lost a microprocessor war first and foremost. In my opinion, Sun needed to respond to x86 by being even more iconoclastic than the company had the stomach for at the time: by buying AMD ca. 2004 and fighting the Intel cross-patent poison pill in court. So in the end, Sun's problem was arguably too many adults in the room, not too few...

The "Innovator's Dilemma" basically. Sun threw gasoline on the fire by giving everything away, but it would have happened anyway.

Buying AMD would have been great.

There's always more to the (inside) story. Meaning I have no idea what's going, so should stay humble if I can't keep my mouth shut.

James Gosling's shared one theory for the downfall of Sun: radioactive packaging of the hot new UltraSparc-II chips cost the company billions.

http://nighthacks.com/jag/blog/336/index.html

I so wish Sun had survived. Jini, JavaSpaces, JXTA, grid computing... I recently had to do some AWS Lambda work (serverless & nodejs) and wanted to kill myself.

Thank you for sharing your views, theories. It's actually therapeutic.

For the curious:

> It was deeply random. It's very randomness suggested that maybe it was a physics problem: maybe it was alpha particles or cosmic rays. Maybe it was machines close to nuclear power plants. One site experiencing problems was near Fermilab. We actually mapped out failures geographically to see if they correlated to such particle sources. Nope. In desperation, a bright hardware engineer decided to measure the radioactivity of the systems themselves. Bingo! Particles! But from where? Much detailed scanning and it turned out that the packaging of the cache ram chips we were using was noticeably radioactive.

There are a few details Gosling left out: Sun trusted those chips enough to omit parity or ECC that would have smoked out the problem early, Sun reversed whatever growing trust it had been earning in enterprise space by blaming the customer and for some time making them sign NDAs to work on the problem, and Sun had engineered their sales so that they only did direct for enterprise sized purchases.

They had really good x86 hardware at a time when the post-dot.com crash wave of companies was getting started, but the sales channels were what you could charge on a credit card on their site, and VARs and the like which usually wouldn't sell to startups. Dell got a great deal of that business because they actually wanted to sell, and by the time these companies' hardware fleets got big enough for enterprise sized orders they'd long mastered how to run Dell or whatever systems to provide a reliable service.

James only has a fraction of the story there. Yes, the alpha emitter (it was radioactive boron) that had contaminated our supplier's SRAM was a serious contributing factor to the (dreaded, infamous, triggering) e-cache parity error on UltraSPARC-II that itself was a major drag on the business. No, it wasn't the only factor (there were many, sadly -- the e-cache parity error represented multiple failures at nearly every level of the system) and no, the e-cache parity error didn't alone change the fundamentals of the business -- but it definitely didn't help!

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