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Comment by zeruch | Hacker News Reader

I was at SUN in the mid/late 90s, when Java and the E10K were released. It was a glorious place to work, with an amazing corporate culture.

Their sale to Oracle was a tragedy.

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I work at Oracle's Java Platform Group, where most of the managers and senior engineers came over from Sun. They all tell me that, despite the normal big-corp issues, work under Oracle's control is better than it was under Sun, where management was more chaotic, strategy unclear, and resources shifted erratically from one project to another, often wasted on unreasonable goals with bad prospects. Not only that, but the commitment to open-source has, at least so far, been stronger (although I can't speak for other parts of the company that I know little about). And because the work has yielded more success, it has resulted in more resources that are, in turn, invested more wisely in projects with better prospects.

Again, I can't speak for other parts of the company, and maybe Java's successful integration into Oracle has been a fluke (given Java's immense success and that it's at the cutting edge of compilation and runtime technology; I do know that the experience of Sun engineers in other areas has not been anything like that of the Java folks), but the Sun people in JPG have been very pleased with how it's been going overall. The work culture in the JPG and the mix of talent and personality, also compare very favourably to Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix (based on reports of friends or hires that came from those companies), and at least on three occasions engineers that left for some of these companies have come back.

It makes sense that those who've stayed on under Oracle have a favorable opinion of how Oracle does things: one might say they are self-selected for it.

Survivorship Bias.

I guess, except that the entire top technical leadership has remained unchanged for thirteen years now -- something Sun wasn't able to maintain for Java -- and they couldn't have known how things would turn out back then. Also, it's not about "how Oracle does things" but "how Oracle runs Java", which is probably quite different from how Oracle does other things. Given the outcome, it's hard to argue that Sun was a better steward to Java.

Good point but still interesting considering Oracle's reputation. One could argue that even those still at Oracle would say "we don't like it but we didn't find something else... we're used to it".

In particular, it excludes very senior people who left almost immediately after the takeover, due to differences with Oracle management -- most notably James Gosling. https://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling...

Wait a minute, an opinion of somebody working at Oracle not bashing Oracle? You deserve downvotes, the only interesting opinions about working at Oracle are those from people who never worked at Oracle! :)

"They all tell me that, despite the normal big-corp issues, work under Oracle's control is better than it was under Sun, where management was more chaotic, strategy unclear, and resources shifted erratically from one project to another, often wasted on unreasonable goals with bad prospects."

What you describe is the post-McNealy era (although I'd argue the last few years of McNealy started to decline as well). Zander was utterly lacking in dynamism and largely just a numbers guy, and Jonathan Schwartz was a total bungler with delusions of "thought leadership".

SUN after 2001 was a very very different animal from prior.

"Again, I can't speak for other parts of the company, and maybe Java's successful integration into Oracle has been a fluke"

They only cared about Java, and to a lesser extent controlling MySQL (the latter being one effectively stupid gambit, but one that's held on some tertiary value). The HW business has been slowly circling the bowl, they borked the OpenOffice, Jenkins and other projects, and their OS side is AWOL.

I know a few folks that went to Oracle to "hide" in the jungle, while they figure out what they actually want to do next. I've had Oracle recruiters call me before over the years, and I just have a long running disdain for their licensing/business approach, to the point that I have either prevented or ripped out every attempt for them in places I've been at.

Very interesting. Nice to get some insider info.

Java came pretty near the end for Sun during a massive time of upheaval for their traditional business model, a massive economic downturn, and a historic change in leadership. Those could also be factors.

It would be interesting to get the same take of before and after from somebody working on SPARC or Solaris.

would they have been better had their sale been to google? Coz that was the only possible alternative outcome tbh.

At least it seems oracle's stewardship of java is good enough (atm at least...).

Sun once tried to merge with Apple

That would have been nice.

That would have been instead of the NeXT merger which brought Jobs to Apple.

It seems likely a Sun-Apple would have ended up with both companies destroyed, and Steve Jobs might have spent the early 2000s hawking enterprise web dev software like he was doing at NeXT in 1995.

What a different world that would've been! I wonder which company would've made the trailblazing iphone in this alternate reality world...

My supposition has been that, absent Apple to throw their weight behind the iPhone, someone would have created a pure touchscreen device (Android had one such concept under development IIRC) but it would have failed because it would have been just one phone among many, gathering dust at retail stores.

Apple bet the farm on one phone, had the built-in fan base to leverage, and the resources to make it work well from day one.

the iphone was also symbiotic outgrowth of the massive ipod success

Though it was a factor -- it's real success was that it was OS X in a tiny phone -- basically a portable Mac with totally wireless connectivity. For many applications you could simply leave your laptop at home and walk on the bus and go on with your day.

Steve Jobs even said at its launch that the iPhone rans OS X and ran "desktop class applications". This with it's multi-touch full screen keyboard and GUI integration meant that people could interact with it much more naturally than any phone in the past. Even my mother could use it, which is remarkable, considering how many cell phones I gave her that she couldn't use.

I guarantee you that the most used features from day one of the iPhone launch were: Safari, Google Maps, and YouTube, with the Music app being simple a "nice to have".

Probably Google with Android. They were working on it at roughly the same time as Apple but released it later. This interview with Chet Haase on the CoRecursive podcast is an interesting account of those years:

https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/

So today Android might have a larger market share. Maybe the Windows Phone would still be a thing.

The joke was the combined company would be called Snapple.

IBM was the other offer on the table. Scott managed to scuttle the deal but his ability to do so was far from a certainty since he was already out as CEO.

Google was pretty much incompatible, they had no interest in workstations or paying for quality as their focus was redundant arrays on inexpensive machines.

Fujitsu was the best actual option for commercial compatibility, but everyone felt it would be a waste of time to pursue that as the USG would almost certainly block a foreign sale.

Google bought Motorola, amd that went okay until Samsung blew its top. Recall this was the era Google was frantically buying IP to shore up it's patent portfolio. Apple had gone "thermonuclear", so a somewhat-independent Google-ow ned Sun was in the realm of possibility,perhaps to be sold piecemeal.

Those patent wars were largely over wireless patents which Motorola had a lot of and Sun… didn’t.

Although Sun and Fujitsu had a long-standing business and development relationship, I think it would also have been problematic from a strategy and cultural perspective. My observation with the 3 big Japanese computer companies (NEC and Hitachi being the others) in the 2000s is that they aspired to be major global computer system suppliers--but weren't willing to actually make the investments to make such a thing possible.

I didn't think at the time that IBM was a good fit. I'm not so sure now in retrospect--though they would have had to rationalize the Unix business in particular.

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