Comment by varunnrao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by varunnrao | Hacker News Reader

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I think what ultimately led to Sun's downfall is a combination of what ESR [1] and joelonsoftware [2] have previously covered.

1. Sun didn't become the defacto desktop platform because they lost out to WinNT. So they lost out on the consumer market. 2. Custom server hardware and software makers like Sun and Silicon Graphics were the fashion till Google and later on Facebook came around and built their own data centers with consumer hardware and specialized software to overcome the inherent unreliability of that hardware. And anyway ever since web-based software became a thing your device is practically a console a la Chromebooks. So they lost the server market.

The only option left was to serve the high end HPC market like labs or even banks but that didn't make business sense since that's increasingly niche because those customers would eventually also want the effects of commoditization.

[1] - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6279 [2] - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/

The real losses were against Windows 2000 (specifically Active Directory) and to Linux.

The loss to Linux was greatly accelerated by Sun's failure to make a deal with Google for Google to use Solaris on their servers. The story I heard was that Scott wanted a server count for the license while Google believed server count was a top secret datum.

If Sun had made a deal with Google in 2002 and worked on OpenSolaris starting in 2001, then Linux might not have been quite the success it became.

It wasn’t Google’s investment that made Linux a viable OS for enterprise applications. Google using Solaris would have made little difference.

Active Directory was a huge win for Microsoft. We’ll see them milk that product for generations. Sun could have captured a part of that, but it’d need to compete against Microsoft when 99.9% of the clients using AD were Microsoft. I doubt they would succeed.

Another fun alt-history branch is the one Sun manages to sell thousands of Amigas as low-end Unix workstations, moving Unix down into the personal computer space, and saving Commodore.

Sadly, none of that happened and we live in the crappiest timeline.

>Another fun alt-history branch is the one Sun manages to sell thousands of Amigas as low-end Unix workstations, moving Unix down into the personal computer space, and saving Commodore.

This never would have happened with the 3000UX, and various websites are guilty of passing on nonsense (like Sun actually having designed the darn thing). Amiga by this time had already fallen behind Apple's 68K offerings. There is no time in history when the 3000UX was competitive with Sun's own products. By this time Sun had three separate offerings (SunOS on SPARC, SunOS on 80386, and PC/IX on 80386) and would not have added another which, again, was technologically behind and incompatible with Sun's own products.

Maybe. Sun could have acquired Commodore in 1984 or 1985 and Dave Miner and the blitter/copper, and gone a bit more the SGI route.

Also, Commodore did the first SVR4 port outside the Labs, and Sun ended up doing the first commercially successful port of SVR4 (Solaris). So it's not that crazy.

(I think the SVR4 porting was probably a mistake. At Sun we had a pejorative for a lot of the garbage in SVR4: "it came from New Jersey".)

> Maybe. Sun could have acquired Commodore in 1984 or 1985 and Dave Miner and the blitter/copper, and gone a bit more the SGI route.

You mean acquire Amiga. Commodore in 1984 was far larger than the brand new Sun. But yes, that is a very intriguing path not taken.

>(I think the SVR4 porting was probably a mistake. At Sun we had a pejorative for a lot of the garbage in SVR4: "it came from New Jersey".)

You obviously are on the West Coast side of the Berkeley/Bell Labs divide. Was there a lot of internal discussion/dissension before/during the SunOS/Solaris transition?

> You obviously are on the West Coast side of the Berkeley/Bell Labs divide.

No, I joined Sun long after the SunOS 4 -> Solaris 2 transition. The "it came from New Jersey" thing was just a pejorative phrase we used for ugly code with ugly code smells that came from SVR4. It was certainly not my coinage, but rather something Sun's greybeards would say. I had occasion to say it myself.

Basically STREAMS and XTI were disasters that took two decades to eradicate. But there was plenty of stuff in userland that wasn't great either. I recall a bug in eqn once that elicited that comment from someone.

> Was there a lot of internal discussion/dissension before/during the SunOS/Solaris transition?

There was plenty of evidence of internal dissent still a decade after the transition. SVR4 just wasn't all that great. And really, Solaris did not resemble SVR4 that much anymore 20 years after the transition. However, Sun was able to make Solaris quite good in spite of SVR4.

Ultimately I think the transition was good for Sun though. More than anything the user-land of SVR4 was fundamentally different from that of BSD primarily because of ELF, and I think ELF was a fantastic improvement over static linking (at the time, and even now because the linkers haven't adopted any of ELF's semantics wins for static linking, though they could).

> Maybe. Sun could have acquired Commodore in 1984 or 1985 and Dave Miner and the blitter/copper, and gone a bit more the SGI route.

Another path not taken is the Commodore 900 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_900> running Coherent. If Sun buys Amiga, perhaps Commodore goes ahead with it and eventually dominates the world via Unix(like)!

Sun selling Amgias would have been quite interesting.

As for AD, Sun had an opportunity to buy u/lukeh's XAD, which was compatible, and it could have done the whole embrace-and-extend thing to MSFT. Instead Sun passed on the deal, Novell bought it instead, and then MSFT acquired Novell. At the time the Sun DS folks were not particularly interested in taking on AD -- they had a cash cow and they were milking it, so no need for innovation.

As for Google using Linux or Solaris, it certainly would have been a PR boost for Sun, and one way or another would have improved Sun's position while denying Linux important resources (contributions from googlers).

Anyways, these things didn't happen.

They didn't lose to NT. The loss in the consumer desktop market occurred in the DOS era.

NT ate the technical workstation space from below. Once NT was good enough on commodity hardware, they were toast.

Unless they went the Apple route and made “luxury workstations” average people would buy. Hindsight is always 20-20, so we now see all the things they could have done then to prevent now from happening.

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