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Most Sun Employees Own Macs
An anonymous user writes, "Most Sun Microsystems employees use Apple when they're not at work. This leaves Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice-president of Sun's software group, hinting at a Sun/Apple partnership." This comes on the heels of Pat Gelsinger, senior VP and chief technology officer of Intel, claiming Apple makes the wrong decisions about CPUs. So it figures Sun, who Intel likely thinks wouldn't know a good processor if it came up and -- um, processed something, would like Macs.
Apple make personal computers and Sun make mostly server machines. It's not really that suprising.
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Even more blast from the past the co-operation between Sun and NeXT for OpenSTEP and such.
Quiz questions -
Which vendor, Sun or Intel, had a 64-bit processor first? By how many years?
Measuring a "good processor" isn't just about speed.
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Are they so convinced that OS X is the future that they are giving up on Solaris and Licensing OS X? :)
These are two different OS's with two different purposes. OS X is more of a desktop OS and a small server. While Solaris is almost entirely a Server OS designed to run on the big machines and it is ok for a workstation usage. Basically most Sun employees don't like the Intel platform and rather have something different. Also when they are home they are also tired of hacking computers and just want it to work and also have their command line interface.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This doesn't suprise me. Really, the only reason UltraSPARC III isn't blasting away everyone else, I believe, is due to manufacturing constraints. Excusing Sun's very low-end equipment, such as the Ultra 5 workstation, their products are generally very solid, very well engineered, very practical, and not totally off-base on cost (when you do an apples-to-apples comparison (was that a pun?)).
It is very understandable why they would prefer Mac OS over Windows, and Macintosh computers over white-box PCs.
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- Install Solaris 9
- Realize that getting the box to halfway resemble the functionality of your Sun box at work would take two onsite admins...
- Take the Sun Blade back
- Buy an Apple (cause its Unix and media capable)
- Profit$$
Remember, there's a reason that your local Sun admin doesn't have a Sun box at his house... (s)he's worked darn hard at getting the applications working off the network at work. Why would they want have to duplicate their efforts at home on the hardware and network they can afford? For what? It's just cheaper and easier to go Apple with the same satisfaction. Of course, if Linux and OSX did not exist and Windows was the only option... Sun employees would have Sun boxes at home. Even if it was just a Sparc2 running SunOS 4.1.1.
So, the senior VP and chief technology officer of Intel, a company that Apple has refused to use the flaship processor from for years, thinks Apple not using the chips they make money on is a bad idea?
And this is supposed to be at all surprising or interesting?
I was in Palo Alto doing a job at Stanford back in mid 2000. Went out to eat at a little Italian place just down from the Cardinal Hotel (who was doing 802.11b in the hotel way back then), and overheard some engineers from Sun talking shop (blah blah Sparc blahblah Solaris blah). I went over and asked them what they thought of Mac OS X. They pooh-poohed it saying Mach was a crappy kernel, the PowerPC was a dead-end, blah blah Objective-C bad blah, and other things. I'm just a lowly Network Admin for whom all things silicon are magic, so I was roundly "put in my place."
With G5s and Panther nigh, it's safe to say those engineers were wrong. Maybe Apple should just buy its way into the Enterprise by snapping up Sun, but then again Solaris is a "dead-end" compared to Linux and the Sparc III is "stuck" back at 1.2GHz blah blah blah....
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
Actually, that's rather telling. NeXT handed Sun a real winner: OpenStep (now Cocoa). It could have revolutionized Sun as a company. What did Sun do with it? Dump it in favor of Motif.
Sun has in its posession the source code to the elegant Lighthouse Design application suite, including word processors, first-rate (Improv-style) spreadsheets, graphics programs, etc., all written for NeXTSTEP, and all portable to Cocoa (and GNUStep, and Sun's own non-purchasable OpenStep implementation, ahem) with some elbow grease. What have they done with it? Nothing. They won't sell the source base. They won't open the source. They won't convert the code and sell product. It's languishing on some shelf somewhere. Instead they bought and distributed the source for crap like StarOffice.
Why hasn't this company gone under yet?
I can understand his fondness for Macs, since OS X is more or less a successor to NextStep. But very few programmers, even at Apple, are fans of the NextStep API. And I'm skeptical as to whether there are as many Mac fans at Sun as he says, or whether this translates into any kind of Sun/Apple synnergy.
Besides, this sort of thing has been tried before. That's why JavaSoft and Taligent were headquartered accross the street from Apple. The clash of egos was always fatal.