A nicer way to frame it is: “value based pricing”.

hire a salesperson to give them fake sales numbers and low ball them so you pay less?

Not to the account reps who's pay put food on their table, vs the bots who don't have children to feed.

And bots don't buy lunch.

that's great as an attitude, the problem with it is that money is made up and so are prices. Business have an inventory and expenses, and hopefully they can sell enough product before their debtors come calling. There's no right price for something. Underpriced, Overpriced, the only qualifier is: is the company still in business? Sony could give Playstation 6's away for free, so long as people bought games for it, but culturally, that would look desperate, so that will have to charge money for it, when they announce it. The only thing something is worth, is what someone else is willing to pay for it.

Periodic component shortages have been a fact of life in the server business forever. Like a key supplier's factory burns down or something.

The key thing is being transparent with customers on price, availability, and delivery schedules. In the short term server vendors can use tricks and personal relationships to extract higher profit margins but eventually the senior executives at major customers figure out what's happening and start looking for other options.

The lead-times are ridiculous, and these guys now only pay attention to the really big guys. Not sure I can blame them though, you've gotta do what's best for your business.

I don't blame them in the sense that I wish for them to be imprisoned or anything. But I wouldn't do business with them, either. I want business partners whom I can count on, not ones who will stop returning my calls as soon as a more lucrative opportunity arises.

Pretty much, except the assistant is never going to handle things and the updated fees go up to include you and the assistant. If you only ever send out your assistant, you never make money

I like this version: The optician quotes the price of new glasses by saying "$100", waits to see if the customer flinches, "... for the lenses", waits again, "... each.".

Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps. All that Dell does is assembling standard, commoditized parts and putting a free OS on it. Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate, while Sun's business is extremely hard to replicate. Of course, Sun's competitive advantage turned into a curse when the components of that vertical integration become uncompetitive both features and price wise vs. the GNU/Linux-on-Intel stack. But regardless, Dell could never replicate the vertical integration Sun had.

At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you

This is how license compliance shakedowns work. Make sure your DRM is more flexible than theicensing terms, find an overage and see what you can get the customer to agree to.

I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.

DELL was an innovator in this "incomparable pricing" model for normal consumers.

You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200.

IIRC they won business awards for this.

Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?

Their old services arm was Kyndryl which they spun out as its own thing

IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.

Imagine every bank you know going through tech modernization and maybe 70% of those are now using Red Hat OpenShift.

They own Red Hat (OpenShift kubernetes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform) AND HashiCorp (Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Packer, Vault, etc.) now, on top of their previous mainframe, services gigs, global financing arm, and calling everything they sell "watson".

I seem to remember IBM had a way to buy their stuff online, but not anymore apparently. I'm sure this was back in the System x days.

Yeah that fits. I was in London (though not the City) and it was definitely that sort of scene.

Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards.

What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.

Yeah, and it wasn't just the "call for pricing" game, it was having to deal with monthly "touching base" calls which were mostly an opportunity to push corporate hospitality and other not-quite-inducements.

Whereas Dell just gave us a flat 30% discount on list pricing, and were clear in advance about what level of annual spend would trigger an increase to 35%. We'd order online and our sales rep would phone a few hours later to confirm. Other than that, they'd initiate contact maybe once a year when Dell refreshed their server or storage product lines and would offer to either send some bumpf or arrange for some demo kit.

Dealing with them was so much less hassle all round, you never got covered in slime, and you never felt like they were on the verge of offering you bribes.

Also thanks to virtualization being originally invented in mainframes, and the OS design done by IBM (and Unisys as well), they get to run the old workloads on modern hardware, and also support various UNIX flavours.

You can even run most cool Python, Go, Java, Rust, PHP among others, on systems like z/OS.

We have a couple mainframes at work, had an incident last year when someone forgot to apply a new license to one. p1, no payments happening.

I was kinda stunned; there’s a level of balls involved in selling an x millions machine and having it fail closed that I’m sort of impressed by but also utterly appalled they’d treat their big customers like that..

I mean surely to fuck it could have been an automated reminder email to the mothership and not just: sorry folks no banking for you today.

Yeah it was so much more accessible to play around with configs and pricing and then all you needed was a credit card.

Even now I think enterprise companies should be more open about what's possible and what the price and delivery date would be without having to talk/chat/email anybody. Even for something like a Juniper $100k+ device it would be kind of cool to configure it.

I’ve had that experience with dell consistently over the last 6+ years. While with other vendors I can do everything over email from start to finish, Dell insists on meetings, follow-ups on topics that I said I am not interested in talking about, services that I do not need, meetings with teams I am not interested in meeting, reps that straight up skip meetings, so I have to console a junior rep that got stuck in a meeting that is above their pay grade. Different reps same slimy bs.

I needed to add a bunch of capacity running Sun/Solaris back in the late-90s. Same thing: pointless meetings with sales reps without clarity in pricing. Finally, I found the gear we were looking for on eBay, bought it, drove over and picked it up in my Ford Explorer, and had it up-and-running in one day. To my surprise, people in my company were PO'ed. But I had air cover because the CEO found out and loved it.

Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell.

In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.

Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors.

As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house".

At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.

Our Sun rep served us well at an academic library. I had no problems provisioning a server with a nice storage array. When things fell apart at Sun our sales engineer from Sun wound up working for us.

I did get to sit in front of the consoles that served the whole school (via telnet) and even hard rebooted them a few times and I wasn't even in a techy major. Just had good relations with the head of school IT. That much exposure was enough to crave a similar computing experience and that's when I installed Linux at home right after college.

I still feel like we're catching up to SMF.

But yeah, the lack of package manager hurt a lot, and there were competing third-party package managers which had totally different pro's/con's and packages and were incompatible with each other... what a mess.

Compared to apt/yum it was kinda comical... but the first party software really was excellent otherwise.

Yes. The software really wasn't all that great. I played a lot with Sun gear and had SGI stuff as well, the polish of the SGI machines vs the 1980's vibe that the Sun gear gave off was on a completely different level. Sun was quality hardware but the software was really a time capsule of what Unix workstations had looked like in the past.

Not to mention the horrible installer. At that time, Debian and Red Hat installs were super-easy compared to Solaris. And Sun controlled their own hardware stack too!

I'm reluctant to call anyone out. I liked Sun a lot, as well as the people I've encountered who worked there. There was a thread between a couple of ex-Sun guys here on hn years ago - I can't find it right now - which made me feel there was a humorous and very human pattern in Sun postmortem comments: "man, that other team really killed Sun, we were doomed after that thing they did." I was pretty curious what the people on that other team (the SPARC microprocessor designers, in the case of that comment thread) might have said in their own defense, where they might have spread some of the blame, and so on.

(perhaps it doesn't do your rather full blog post justice to compare it to something considerably less complete like a comment thread)

Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome

I emphatically agree. Maybe it goes without saying but with Sun, multiple generations of leadership, I think.

Yes. There were lots of other things they could have done.

I'm not saying it would've been easy. They could've installed the GNU tools in a different path and left it up to the user to change their preference. They did something similar with putting the BSD tools in "/usr/ucb" (I may have that path wrong.)

zfs + solaris zones were amazing

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.

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.

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.

That doesn't exist. No department is every completely at fault. No department has enough budget to sink a company alone. It is always a lot of departments that don't turn in expected results - often for reasons not in their control.

The fault is always upper management not doing their job. Even if one department really would be that bad (which again they are not), upper management allowed them to be that bad.

There are lots of different support contracts. Some of them really do cover the entire site. You seem to not realize the scale of a large data center. If every device lasts 5 years you are replacing 10 per day is not unheard of.

I'm guessing it is the size of your company or datacenter. You have to be throwing around millions of dollars to get the opened ended contracts.

Java applets!

Maybe - ask me in 20 years...

Nobody knows how the future will be. There are lots of options. There are self hostable open models today - they are not as good, but some report they are good enough. Right now I don't have the hardware to try them (I could - if I'm willing to accept a small number of tokens per minute - useful means more tokens per second as I can get in an hour). However I expect in a few years I'll be able buy consumer hardware with good enough GPUs (or perhaps an AI chip???). Will anyone other than a few hobbyists buy them? time will tell.

I think prices will go down not up eventually and everybody will have access to it in abundance. That might make most current AI companies go down of course.

And space launches. The Big Names will lose a ton of money and disappear as the tech commoditises.

The moat is Being Able To Do Things No One Else Can and as both hardware and software commoditise that moat disappears.

Open LLMs are already only a few months behind the frontier models and as soon as someone works out that accessible and cheap domain-specific custom training has the potential to be a gamechanger the Big Names will die.

Math puzzles only get you so far.

LLMs are in their Big Compute phase, and it's only a matter of time before that ends - because the intelligence of the frontier models isn't increasing fast enough and providing big enough benefits to make the models more valuable than cheaper, smaller competition.

It lives on in the world of LLMs in a way.

Citrix is still everywhere you need a client that can do things a web browser can’t—like run ancient VB4 software or talk to device hardware—deployed at scale.

Citrix was bought out by PE for $16.5B a few years ago, under the (sadly correct) assumption they hadn’t been charging their customers enough money for this essential tech.

Chromebooks…

$1000k ?

Remember, "The Network is the Computer".

Which is why it is kind of ironic having folks discussing microservices as something groundbreaking.

Counterpoint: it actually sucked. Entire universities lost a day's work when their editors were all fatally stuck in an rpc.lockd bug.

Love that t-shirt. Does it have the Meta logo on the back of it? /s

Oof, the killing and subsequent unkilling of Solaris x86 in 2002 brings back very bad memories -- Sun management at its worst. It also highlighted the relative power of Sun's engineering in that everyone in Solaris knew it was the wrong decision, and we more or less disobeyed orders: during that period (January 2002 to August 2002, when it was reversed), we didn't change our treatment of x86. (And in particular, breaking x86 was grounds for a putback to be backed out.)

When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.

It indeed was a fantastic place, doors nailed to the walls, trying out the newly fledged Mapreduce and Charlie's. Good times. Good times.

RE: JXTA, right around the turn of the century, it felt like there was an opportunity for a globe-spanning peer-to-peer application layer, based on content-addressable storage.

DHTs—Chord paper was 2001—started popping up. The big software vendors looked at the architectural (if not legal) success of Napster & the other P2P networks and were invested in finding legitimate applications. Open standards were seeing real adoption left and right.

But it didn’t happen. Maybe simultaneously too late in the Internet’s evolution and too early.

Too late because the big kids were involved. Especially Microsoft, who would never allow any standard they couldn’t EEE to emerge. Too early because the players like Google who later could muscle through core infrastructure standards weren’t there yet.

And now it’s likely too late, with mobile embedding a client-server model with the weight of 10B devices.

Yep. Solaris was the Unix for the 90's. I worked at a couple of early ISPs and users demanded Sun Solaris shell servers. At a couple of startups, we built everything on Solaris because Linux wasn't accepted in the enterprise yet.

By the early 2000's, 1) Linux was solid, why bother with Solaris? 2) ebay and other channels were flooded with used Sun hardware from failed dot-com companies anyway. No need to buy new.

Assuming that the PC was actually supported.

I had to survive with 800x600 on a 1024x768 monitor for quite some time.

Later in 2003, when I joined CERN, there were still Sun workstations being used, and I was an earlier user of Scientific Linux in 2004.

Afterwards Nokia Networks were still deploying into HP-UX, and the first big Linux project started around late 2005, to Red-Hat.

At my employer in 1999 we were maintaining home-grown binary modification to the Solaris kernel so that TCP segment send and receive were not O(N^2) where N was the number of addresses on the interface :-/ It was, as far as I could tell, an operating system that nobody had ever tried to use before. For anything where we could avoid Sun we used FreeBSD. One of the nice things about the free Unixes of that time was that process and thread creation or destruction were orders of magnitude faster than on Sun. To me, Sun was obviously in a lower category than Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD.

The linux kernel didn't even gain SMP until 1996. Solaris was running circles around it both before and after that point. Solaris was vastly more mature and stable.

Of course, after that, Solaris just kept running in very expensive circles while linux went on to make steady progress.

it was called "Slow arse". This was because it was rather reluctant in handing out resources (memory fe). Having fought it, I remember the system APIs being really well defined and picky (which was good). At one point, the C compiler had some identity issues "am I 32 bit, or 64 bit?"

Awesome. I'm not in a position at my company to move the needle much in terms of buying, but I would love to support you guys any way I can.

How timely, I was just thinking about Sun after doing some office rearranging last week and running into a bunch of sun branded ethernet cables.

My personal favourite UI was HyperNeWS built on Sun's NeWS.

Edit: Writing PostScript and having no discernible security probably didn't make NeWS a great fit for the world of the Internet - but it was a lot of fun.

Yeah, 1993 is when things really took off. First SLS, then Slackware, and using Slackware as the build environment: Debian.

You also had SuSE, which really started as German-localized Slackware.

"Free", until mid 90s I guess most people bought Linux distros on CDs, later DVD (no downloads). For me the big, big plus on Linux (vs. Dos / Windows), had been all the free compilers.

I also recall that Linux on a PC often beat the performance of Unix equipment I could access in contemporary times. There was a lore around those machines, but my actual experience doing basic FOSS-adjacent dev work (bash, make, gcc, autoconf) was that the Linux PC was faster as well as inexpensive.

The exceptions were mostly hardware graphics accelerators in some labs, when my Linux PC had to do it in software. And I got myself a surplus DEC Multia (alpha) that was really fast with Linux for natively compiled code, beating my contemporary 486DX3-100. But, the PC was still faster for web browsing, because running Netscape on alpha meant doing x86 emulation!

Likewise, my ~90 MHz Pentium MMX laptop with Linux was faster at regular dev work on my work-supplied Sun Ultra workstation in the late 90s. (Edit: Hmm, I am not sure about this laptop anymore, it might have been 166 MHz??)

Due to my positive experiences, I was an aggressive early adopter (and frequent beta tester) of nearly every Linux ecosystem frontier for decades. E.g. 2D accelerators, 3D accelerators, SMP, large file support, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, power management, virtualization, 64 bit architectures, SCSI/SATA/Firewire/e-SATA/NVME, hardware and MD-RAID, ext2/ext3/xfs/btrfs, ...

The vast majority of Linux installations don’t have a UI, they’re headless, and it was the same with Sun. I.E. the UI is irrelevant to the success or failure of Linux and Sun.

Linux took over the world because any licensing model that requires a per CPU license simply can’t work in a massively scalable situation like server farms and cloud.

But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI.

Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability.

Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.

But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times.

My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well.

Combined with Linux package managers being infinitely better, the GNU core utilities having so many more conveniences and options than the Solaris equivalents, I felt like Sun was this dinosaur that couldn’t die fast enough. I’ll still never understand why so many people praise Sun for its engineering culture when free software seemed so superior to me at the time.

My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.

Maybe in the 90s the standards were different. Maybe their tech was better. But by the time I ever used their software is was the butt of jokes.

I remember a web page put up by an SGI employee, saying that x86 wasn't going to destroy the Unix workstation business. The title was "Pecked To Death By Ducks".

Then Intel came out with dual-core processors, which was the new hotness. So he wrote a followup page, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills".

At the time, I thought they were funny, and made reasonable arguments. But in retrospect, they were just trying to distract the customers from the fact that Intel was overtaking them.

IaC is really just declarative shell scripts. It's a different language, but it's often just kicked off by some bash in a git action.

Once you have git and actions, I don't think that the language really matters all that much.

Part of my maturing with getting older in addition to the above is that luck is a larger factor than most people are willing to admit. So I'm with you that GTM is just as important as engineering, but execution on all fronts is what tilts the luck factor. And with luck you get exceptions which is why you can get companies that seem to succeed despite themselves.

Speaking of another Steven, the Dell Dude:

Things were going great at Dell until its wildly popular advertising campaign suddenly came tumbling down over an unfortunate indiscretion on the Lower East Side that surprised absolutely nobody...

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/02/10/deli.dude.arrest/

'Dell Dude' arrested for marijuana possession

Monday, February 10, 2003 Posted: 3:55 PM EST (2055 GMT)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Benjamin Curtis, better known as the "Dell Dude" from the computer company's television commercials, was arrested Sunday while he allegedly attempted to buy marijuana on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Steve The Dell Dude Commercial Compilation (DUDE WE'RE GETTING A DELL!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJxTHMygpDY

Right before they fell face-first into the grave, they did finally ship the v20z, which was a completely reasonable way to run Solaris x86. Its management board ran Linux on PowerPC, for irony purposes.

I do blame them, along with the rise of Java ...for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree.

I avoided studying CS for this reason: I saw my girlfriend's Java textbooks and thought if I had to appreciate this, I wasn't cut out to be a programmer, and stuck to network engineering. Years later, after 'Gang of Four' style OOP started dying, I have some code in a new things people use here everyday.

I appreciate this comment for reviving memories of pine and lynx and all of that

I used a machine that had 8MB of RAM and a huge b&w monitor. One day I found out it would crash if your process forked more than 127 times. These things were so cool at the time but are nothing compared to a Raspberry Pi.

Where can one buy the Oxide t-shirt

The good thing about Sun (when working at a corporate customer) was that they were very good at getting their distinguished tech people into give talks - Tim Bray, James Gosling etc.

Good timing. But on the other hand if you had sold AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, ORCL, AVGO, ADI, KLAC, LRCX, etc at the Internet bubble top then you would have missed out on huge gains since then.

that right

I worked there right before they sold to Oracle for a bit—my impression was a lot of brilliant engineers but no unified product story.

I know OP has an intimately inside perspective, whereas what I know about Sun is only from what I read online as an admirer and developer on its platforms… but “gotten bored of the mechanics of running a business” does not match what seemed to be more about having gotten “too enterprise-y” or “too out of touch with the market” and maybe also “too hubristic.”

On-prem vs cloud though, is two very different things.

In the later, I don't have to worry about hardware/power/networking/etc at all.

As someone that buys hardware today, all the hardware companies are now in the "we don't want to do business with you" territory.

lol. at first i thought this is going to be about what Sun Tzu got wrong and i was ready to refute.

It's path dependence. If you built a Sun-syle x86 server with a serial console and inserted a random Linux installer CD, the installer would probably only output VGA and thus it wouldn't work.

Yeah, that was amazing. And so, I learned how to provide LILO + agetty on COM1 on every server I was admining :) So, unless there was HW fault, I could just connect to server via serial to check things out.

You seem to be focusing strictly on performance,

Just like the vast majority of buyers do. SPARC was abandoned by customers due to poor performance.

but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86

That's a property of the systems integrator, not the ISA. Dell's iDRAC works quite well.

I don't know, the clustering on Solaris was pretty amazing, if we are just judging "ahead of time"

I loved Sun hardware but I'll deny that they were ahead of their time after 2003 or so. I had a boss who loved his pizza box but Intel/Linux crushed them in the 2000s on a price/performance basis.

Yes, I had the same experience while using various Sun computers between 1995 and 2005. During all that decade the Sun computers were reliable, but excessively slow.

Around the beginning of 2006, I had a laptop with a 64-bit AMD Turion CPU and I could run on it Cadence and Mentor tools for ASIC design and the simulations were much faster than on a big Sun multi-processor server. Later that year our team finally got some servers with AMD Opteron, which accelerated dramatically the work in comparison with the traditional Sun servers.

I recall a fork/exec heavy shell script at a previous job that ran about an order of magnitude (~25s vs 3s) slower on Solaris/SparcV9 vs Linux/Intel P3 circa 2003. The standard retort back in those days was to rewrite it in Perl.

One of the things that Larry Ellison found utterly baffling when he acquired Sun was the way that sales commission was calculated. It was all on the value of the contract, with no requirement for the contract to be profitable.

At least in the later stages of life Sun sales folks were literally selling the company into bankruptcy. They'd find out what competitors were offering, undercut it to the degree they'd make a loss, just to get the contract and their sweet commission.

To not realise you've got this going on really speaks to how little they were interested in the actual running of the business.

Yea he’s wrong. Plenty of people switched to dell cause of Linux and open source . In our case the switch was from alpha and vms

I'm perceiving a lot of enthusiasts of the race to the bottom here. Yes, Dell and Linux could offer prices and convenience that undercut frontier hardware companies like Sun and SGI. But now what do we have? The loss is palpable to those of us who used to work with varied hardware competing to awe us, not to mention filling niches much more satisfactorily than one-size-fits-all.

Buying from Sun may have devolved into a direct-touch upsell disaster. Esp. compared to Dell which at one point was almost unique in having a working, easy-to-use web product configurator. Dell really nailed "getting products ordered and to the customer is part of the value equation"—a supply chain virtue no one else was really optimizing 1990–2005.

But selling to Sun Microsystems as a vendor was a joy. It paid bills like clockwork (net 35 IIRC). Completely showed up all the multi-$B IT competitors. They preached hyper-efficiency, but Sun delivered it in its own dealings. Unfortunately after the dot-com downfall Sun extended days payments outstanding (DPO) just like everyone else.

Sun? Sun Microsystem?

MS Word was a descendant of Bravo and Gypsy on the Xerox Alto, not ND-NOTIS. NOTIS is an interesting footnote in the history of software, but PARC's influence on early microcomputing is well-known and recognized.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto#Software

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-NOTIS

Berners-Lee made the first web server true but it was on a NeXT not Norsk Data

Sun was just never really setup to sell lots of small servers. You have different pipeline when your goal is to sell million dollar E10K servers.

I got to see a server installed via crane because they couldn't go up in that building's elevator.

I remember the attitude was that solaris was for serious professionals and had the highest calibre of code. For the most part it seemed true and these were solid workhorses. But, i did end up finding concurrency bugs when they introduced their multi-core integer computing behemoth.

While we're reminiscing, I never did understand why Sun paid a billion dollars for MySQL in 2008.

So far the best theory I've heard was that it was bait to make them tastier to IBM and Oracle - but even that seems kind of weak; had they really given up at that point? Does anyone have a better theory?

I worked on enterprise software around the turn of the century. There was no database/os combo more bullet proof than Oracle on Solaris. Solaris was a great OS but the speed and ferocity that Linux killed Sun was something I will never forget.

I went to the Menlo Park offices to see a demo of their 64-cpu (I think) system at the time but it didn’t take long for Linux on intel killed the entire market.

HN lift of James Gosling's story about the radioactive UltraSparc II

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638929

I was once SUN Microsystems Campus Ambassador at Oxford University and our first lecture was about dtrace! The guy from SUN was blown away by attendance so the higher ups wanted to do more & more events in bigger rooms. But as corporate weeks passed, I started telling them to postpone because everyone was entering the exam sessions. Corporate of course did not listen. Long story short, SUN sent 3 experts but we couldn’t get the crowds and the main lecture room was embarrassingly empty.