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Employee (Almost) Chronicles Sun's Top Ten Failures
Business and Open Source pundit Matt Asay picked up on a recent attempt by Sun's Dan Baigent to chronicle the ten largest failures that took the tech giant from a $200 billion peak valuation to the recent buyout by Oracle for a mere $7.4 billion. Unfortunately, Dan only made it to number three on his list before Sun pulled the plug. How long will it take corporate overlords until they finally realize that broad level censorship and trying to control the message are far more harmful than just becoming part of the discourse? "I find that I tend to learn much more from my failures than from my successes. I'd be grateful for the chance to learn from Sun's, too. Sun, please let Baigent continue his countdown. It allows Sun to constructively chronicle its own failings, rather than allowing others to do so in less generous terms."
1. Not enough free soda pop.
*cue Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra to play something catchy*
Company leadership would like people to think that the company has no failures. Ridiculous, of course, but there you have it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I hope he'll find another way to speak up. Maybe at a later time. I would be looking forward to it. It was an interesting read.
2. It ain't called Slowaris for nothing.
As the original article says, "There may be Securities and Exchange-related reasons for shuttering the posts."
So, Schwartz was an nay-sayer on the topic of Open Source for years, and then decided that Open Source would save the company and started promoting it. Open Source is really cool, but it wasn't ever going to save Sun. I can't even begin to wonder how he thought it would.
Bruce Perens.
...failing to convince the federal government to give them billions of dollars. It's all the rage among business plans these days.
everything in moderation
It's rarely the engineers who screw things up like that.
It's the suits who don't understand something and then write press releases / marketting material on their lack of understanding.
I fondly remember my (then) boss at my first job out of university going, in one day, down to marketting to explain to them how they'd just killed a two million dollar product line because they couldn't be arsed to call first, and then down to HR to explain that they couldn't shorten a job listing to "five years programming experience in [2 year old web technology]" from "five years programming experience and one year in [2 year old web technology]".
Of course, this was the same man who would go fishing in the middle of a lake (and cell dead zone) during every customer live date, so he didn't have to listen to them complain about the fonts or colors.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
4. Hey, let's give everything away for free! That'll bring in the profits.
FTFY.
L.E.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't see why people would think that Sun, or Oracle for that matter, would want their ineptness broadcast to the world, when the only benefit from doing so would be for others (their competitors especially) to learn from said mistakes. It would be like them saying "Hey IBM, here is a list of what NOT to do in the future." I seriously doubt Oracle would enjoy giving people a play book of things to avoid, as opposed to hoping those mistakes WERE repeated. If anything they should create a list of "mistakes" that they've invented that would help them in regards to their competition reading it, as opposed to hurting themselves.
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
5. Turns out Gosling preferred tea.
Until it's demonstrably true?
There's a reason so many large institutions want to "control the message", and despite our best wishes to the contrary, it's because controlling the message works. Yes, there are downsides, such as the risk of Streisand effect, but quashing off-message discussion is a proven strategy.
Managing public relations, and managing your brand, is a useful tool. You're living in a dream world if you think it isn't. That's not to say it's not important to be aware of, and to learn from, institutional shortcomings... but to allow employees to broadcast them far and wide is doing nothing but hurting your brand.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Employees that are so stupid they think this kind of stunt is OK.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The summary makes a leap of logic. The company was never really worth 200 billion except in the eyes of the guy that bought his shares at $253.88 back in September of 2000.
So the loss of value isn't strictly due to mistakes the company made. The stock market crash accounts for most of that drop.
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
Apple, during those times before Jobs came back, that is. Look at the server line-up. Too many CPU options (AMD, Intel, UltraSPARC T line, UltraSPARC IV, SPARC64), too many OS options (Solaris, Linux, Windows), f'ed up renaming and branding attempts of Sun's software stack, very confusing model numbers/names for their servers, getting rid of the highly popular US-IIIi entry-level server line, etc. etc. I've been using Sun servers for a very long time and have been a proponent but the last couple years have been very frustrating with them. They never fixed the performance issue the online support site has, for example. I think Schwartz was not a good choice to lead Sun after McNealy left. There is one good thing that came out of Sun in the last couple years, though: open-sourcing of Solaris.
Well, ego.
But, really, who cares? Any right thinking person knows some mistakes were made. The deal with Oracle is done.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I worked at Sun briefly. My office was across the corridor from a corner office CTO type. One day I overheard him ranting to someone, wondering 'why anyone would want to use Linux when they could be using Solaris -- that has everything -- instead.'
I swear the guy was channeling Ken Olsen, when he said: "...the beauty of UNIX is it's simple, and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there."
If I did the same thing at my company I would have simply been terminated.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This isn't the only Sun censorship going on. Tim Bray (of XML fame, now Sun's Director of Web Tech) had a very insightful post on his 'ongoing' blog comparing Sun's strengths and weaknesses with Oracle's. It was up for all of a day before the lawyers stepped in and made him take it down.
It was all in vain, of course -- caches and copies will beat redactions every time. Here's one copy:
Us and Them
Interesting stuff!
Ironically, a couple of decades ago they were sitting there with literally the keys to the realm in their hands, and they threw them away. Back in the late 80's they introduced the Sun386i workstation, featuring (drumroll..) Intel's 386 processor and a 386 port of SunOS. This was a proper preemptive multitasking OS with 32-bit virtual memory and a decent GUI, far ahead of Windows 2.x at the time. Not only that, it also had a functioning DOS emulator, allowing the machine to run MS-DOS programs. By focusing on x86, and selling SunOS/x86 for $50 or so they could have become the Microsoft of today.
But, they weren't interested in playing the massive volumes with razor thin margins game of the PC world, thinking that the unix workstation market was insulated from the PC market. After all, PC's were for chumps running 1-2-3 and Wordperfect. So they introduced their own hardware, SPARC, and discontinued SunOS/x86. Of course, as TFA says, they re-entered the x86 game in 2002, but by then it was too little, too late.
The failure to see the cost effectiveness afforded by the massive volumes of x86 chips Intel was turning out is all the more damning considering the main reason they had become the dominant unix workstation vendor wasn't that their hardware or software was leagues ahead of their competitors, but rather that they were cheaper.
Starting in 3... 2... 1...
I just made the mistake I've been complaining about with others - it wasn't a prosecution because it wasn't a criminal case.
Solaris was made usable by GNU software but by trying to lock Unix into a proprietary environment SUN, IBM and HP nearly caused it to fail when Microsoft came out with a good enough solution with NT. Sure first they started killing of Novell with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups but the Wintel model worked from the ground up. Sun grew to its peak during the dotcom era where Lintel started undercutting the rest of the Unix business around the edges. Maybe if Sun had freed Solaris right after the bust and rode the x86 space with more effort, maybe Solaris would be what Linux is today. The only way to succeed as a technology company in the long run it to put effort into undercutting your own market before someone else does. They figured out what to do, just six years too late. Now we'll see if Oracle is willing to undercut some of its established high margin database market with low margin MySQL. Its going to happen anyway, the question is will they lead and profit from it or just let the business disappear.
Open Source would have saved Sun, if they had thought of it 18 years ago. But they spent so long fighting it, when they finally flipped no one cared.
Apple begs to differ.
Sun apparently didn't do their job *to the very end* at various points.
1. x86 - they entered the market, but not quite (no desktops, no laptops, no low-cost servers, only big machines). You can run Solaris on x86 but not quite. You can even run it on a laptop and have NVidia accelerator running, but for most people it's still a dream, urban legend as they can't do it at home with their own hardware. Maybe they shouldn't enter x86 at all?
2. Java cross-platform myth. Write once - run anywhere... not quite. It's very very popular as "enterprise" solution, but most people don't use any Java desktop apps, applets were disaster and JavaFX... later about that!
3. Open source and their products. We all know Java is open source now (finally, and obviously with large amount of work done by RedHat!), but Solaris? Binary blobs must be included in any build to make it work. Incompatible with GPL libenses, and also not a BSD model - what was that all about? It was like: "yeah we want to be part of open source movement. but you can't fork our code too much".
4. Failure on building community. This IS a big deal. Linux has got great large community of users/developers/fans. Apple has got it's army of zombie fanboys. Sun tried to build community around OpenSolaris and failed. "Project Kenai", "Zembly" look like half-finished sites. Just compare it with Github (I know it's a bit different usage but hey). The only successful one is Netbeans.org IMHO, but still - could be more successful if they didn't require signing agreement before submitting patches. Hell, I love Netbeans but I won't send them my code so they can use it in closed-source Sun Studio.
5. Not allowing interested users to use their innovative products. I am a software developer. I write software using Linux. I wanted to try out JavaFX... and you know what? It doesn't run on Linux. I wanted to write widgets on desktop using cutting-edge JVM drag-from-firefox-to-desktop feature, and expected my browser not to crash. I finally wanted x64 Java plugin for years, and once it got here - most people already use OpenJDK.
6. Desktop Java. Swing could be most popular GUI toolkit today if it integrated nicely with Gnome desktop for years now, if Java could be distributed easily with Debian, and people wrote software for it. No, let's keep Java close till it becomes obsolete on desktop and release it then. Crazy.
7. Trying to be service provider. OK, sun's hardware is great. Service providers buy Sun's hardware, say data centers. Now, one day, Sun becomes services provider, direct competitor of people who buy hardware from this company. Isn't there a conflict of interests?
8. No one mainline software. Yeah, sun has Solaris. But also had Linux distro. Bought MySQL, but also had flirted with PostgreSQL, Apache derby. It obviously confuses people, and look at IBM: "Go run Linux and DB2 on our servers".
9. Bunch of outdated, obsolete software that no one use. Some basic software like shells that come with Solaris were totally out of date till recently. And they still run "innovative" projects that failed many years ago: Project Looking Glass as best example.
10. Sparc failure. Maybe not exactly a failure. I know it's really great processor family. It has got potential. It's fast, multi-core, modern. Probably made them loose lots of money recently. What went wrong here? Maybe they should license chips for third-parties? Maybe they should build and push desktop/mobile versions? Maybe they should abandon it for PowerPC to provide better compatibility with IBM? I really don't know, but they did something wrong, and giving it's own customers alternative as AMD servers didn't help.
They did too much things wrong, and maybe too much things in general at the same time rather than concentrate on what brings them profit - their hardware.
Uh... the guy posted this shit to his blog. He works for the company he's bad mouthing. That's pretty stupid. It doesn't take much "evidence" beyond what the guy already provided. If Sun had many more employees of that caliber, it's little wonder they declined.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
It's the nature of large organizations. Brandybuck's law states that the collective intelligence of an organization is inversely proportional to its size. That applies to chess clubs, corporations, and governments. The larger the company, the dumber they are.
It's even been shown to be true via economic analysis. The top down control of a firm hinders the natural distribution of localized information. This affects all firms, but with small organizations it's just background noise. But above a certain size firms will become so bogged down in process that they cease to operate. Which is why large companies artificially divide themselves up into smaller semi-autonomous divisions. And why huge multinationals only exist only in an environment where government hands out special privileges and subsidies like candy. Leftists like to bitch about businesses running government, and the right about governments running businesses. But they're both the same thing, shielding businesses from the natural market mechanisms that would otherwise limit their size.
Yeah, it's sad that Sun is squashing openness, and sad that they can't see it's ultimately bad for them. But you can't expect much else from a corporation of their size.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I think Linux was a big part of this as well, I switched from sunos/sparc to x86/linux because it was
faster on my engineering applications. Lower license use cost, lower hardware cost came into it also...
x86/sunos or linux/sparc never really factored into it....
As indicated, there is knowledge to be gained from failures. So, why should a company be more eager to share it than any of their other proprietary data? It would be better to keep it secret and let the other companies make the same mistakes.
This goes back a ways, but it is a great example of the problems at Sun. SunPeak. Those that know this project, know how much time and money Sun sunk into this over several years in the 90's, only to scrap most of it just prior to Y2K. Shareholders would be shocked. The numbers you are thinking of are dwarfed by what this project eventual ate up.
The continued emphasis of Sun on Sun and making everything a showcase was what doomed this project to re-inventing/re-starting itself every 6 months as the OS revved, the hardware revved, or Oracle Apps revved. Ironically Oracle is about to own Sun.
anyone know how I can catch some zzz's at work? without anybody catch me of course!
The summary makes a leap of logic. The company was never really worth 200 billion except in the eyes of the guy that bought his shares at $253.88 back in September of 2000.
So the loss of value isn't strictly due to mistakes the company made. The stock market crash accounts for most of that drop.
Sun has US$ 13B worth of revenue with 25,000 employess, Red Hat has $400M with 2,200, and yet they' have a roughly equivalent market cap ($3-6B).
The stock market is not based on logic.
It's ridiculous and childish to call this censorship, it's not... Thumbs down to the "I'm entitled to everything I feel like" generation. The submitter needs to move out of his parents basement, get a job, and learn how the world works.
Baigent works for Sun, anybody with a nickel of common sense would know that not only is it unprofessional to communicate the kind of crap he was trying to, it is also against most company's policies to do so, and I would bet your lives Sun is no different.
If he wants voice his assessment (top 10 list) he is welcome to quit his job and post his opionion, as long as he doesn't violate any agreements he made with Sun. It would be censorship if they prevented him from voicing his opinion outside of any agreement he has with Sun.
...marketing slogan that Sun ever waisted money on... "What can we dot com for you today?"
Seriously. I've worked at Sun a long time. If his next 7 reasons were as bad as his first 3, then score one for censorship! He's a "Senior Director" at Sun folks...that's like the fox whining about how the hen house caught on fire.
They are a little younger than MicroSoft and Apple.
Sun did a lot of interesting things in its first decade like pioneer networking, build one of the earliest usable graphics computers, and the best flavor of UNIX. They stumbled in the 1990s before briefly recovering with JAVA, then downhill again.
i've had one in the lab for 2 weeks.
because it ran out of Hydrogen.
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
When Sun started they used standard parts to build their boxes and a standard operating system (Unix which every college lab had at the time). Somewhere along the line the went to their own version of Unix their own chips, their own everything. Kind of the same thing that made Apple a niche initially.
Personally I think Sun got lucky with how they were positioned when the Internet showed up and they never really understood how to reproduce the unreproducable.
And on a micro level moving hundreds of people from Menlo Park to Newark and then back a year or two later was just stupid, disruptive and expensive.
.
.
Interview Tip #1: Don't B*tch about your previous company during an interview! Wait until you get the job first.
In publishing, it's never just content, and it's never just marketing. There's got to be an audience. "We don't know how to sell your magazine" is a perfectly good reason to kill a magazine, if it's true.
I'm a writer myself, and I work for both literary and lifestyle magazines. Lit mags lose money. No matter how good the content, they operate in the red, and that's the way it is. Lifestyle rags make money, sometimes hand over fist, and sometimes with deplorable content. People buy them, and advertisers underwrite them.
It does not matter how good your content is. If it does not sell, you're out of business.
so somebody better post them here for posterity, and I guess that will be me.
End of an Icon
It's been quite a while since I've written anything in my blog. Having worked for the Corporate Development group at Sun for the past 3 1/2 years, I've had to be very careful about what I posted on a public blog. I felt it was better to be safe than sorry, so I've left it to the many other prolific bloggers at Sun to tell our story.
But with the recent announcement that Sun will become part of Oracle, I feel able for the first time to talk about how we got here. Not about the Oracle acquisition itself, but rather how we as a company came to the point where seeking an acquirer was the best way forward. Granted, 2009 is one of the most challenging years in decades and many companies are struggling, but when I joined Sun in 1997, we had the technology world by the tail and were poised to become as influential and lucrative as our more famous rivals (Microsoft, IBM, Intel, HP and even Oracle). So as excited as I am about becoming part of Oracle (there were many far worse options in my opinion), it still feels a little anti-climatic.
So as a sort of "post mortem" on the company, I'd like to examine where I think Sun really missed its opportunities. Some things are only obvious in hind sight, but many of these things are things I've spent my career at Sun advocating and attempting to drive forward. Maybe this is a bit of sour grapes on my part, but mostly this is just an attempt to say externally some of what I've been saying internally at Sun for most of my tenure, now that our future as a Corporation is moving out of our hands.
I will call this my "Top 10 Reasons Sun is Setting". In typical Top 10 fashion, I will start with the #10 Reason Sun is Setting and work my way up to the #1 reason. I know there is a lot of opinion on this topic out there, so feel free to comment as you see fit. I think we may all find this cathartic.
Posted on: Apr 23, 2009
Posted by: dbaigent
Category: Sun
Comments:
Don't blame employees. Just look back at the Sun very recent history. December 2008 : Southeastern Asset Management enter the board. April 20, Southeastern Asset Management sells all its stocks : http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINN2150514720090421?rpc=44.
Think about that.
Posted by Dominique on April 23, 2009 at 09:36 AM PDT #
I have a question for you Sir
When you hear that Oracle wants to make 15% profit in the first year, are you embarressed? I mean you (and the other managers) could have cut all those useless projects that Oracle will cut now years ago, couln't you? Does it really need Larry Ellison to make a company with 13bn revenue and 55% gross margin profitable?
Posted by Mista on April 23, 2009 at 10:36 AM PDT #
I don't blame employees - at least not the rank-and-file. Sun is full of great, dedicated, energetic people who have done some incredible things with technology. Better than our rivals. My comments will be more on missed opportunities and poor strategies, not on the failure of any specific employees.
Posted by dbaigent on April 23, 2009 at 11:43 AM PDT #
No, I am not embarrassed by the idea that Oracle might turn a profit when Sun alone could not. It's easy to turn a profit by slashing jobs. Sun has been trying to turn a profit through increasing revenues, which is much harder.
Posted by dbaigent on April 23, 2009 at 11:50 AM PDT #
Increase revenue? With what?
- with Looking Glass? Darkstar? Wonderland?
- with a webserver?
- with support fees of 1000$/socket for an application server or a database while direct competitors charge at least 20x that much?
- with cutting prices for products (Openstorage or Niagara) ?
Posted by Mista on April 23, 2009 at 12:31 PM PDT #
The strategy for increased revenue depended on increasing the attach rate for existing products by leveraging communities of customers who
We failed to understand the x86 Market
It often gets mentioned by the press and certain analysts that Sun didn't get into the x86 market soon enough, or strong enough, or didn't drop SPARC when it should have, or some other such criticism. I believe Sun entered the x86 market when it had to (our first foray into the market was the oft-lamented LX50 server back in 2002) and has done a decent job (with the help of Andy Bechtolsheim) at differentiating our offerings while maintaining a competitive price (although margins are another matter altogether).
The problem is we didn't understand the x86 market. We approached the market in the only way we knew how - as an extension of our high-end, low-volume, high-value approach to network computing. And not just in terms of product features and capabilities, but in terms of sales, partnerships, channel programs and supply chain management. We've been improving over the years, but we still have a channel strategy that leverages our traditional partners and programs and does not effectively take our volume products to volume customers.
Our other mistake was to allow our strategy for proliferating Solaris on x86 to overshadow our need to drive volume for our x86 business. Although Sun has been offering Linux on our x86 systems since 2003 and has recently entered into OEM agreements with both Microsoft and VMWare, our focus as a company has been exclusively on Solaris. It is the only OS we pre-install on our hardware. The key to gaining momentum in the channel is to provide the environments that customers want, which for x86 is still predominantly Linux and Windows. We needed to focus on Solaris, but in the area of ISV recruitment and creating solutions that uniquely leverage Solaris and add value to customers, thereby creating demand. By failing to promote other OS offerings and solutions within the channel, we became a niche player in their mind and ultimately became an after thought in their sales to end users. Volume drives the channel, the channel drives volume and volume is the only way to make money in the x86 market.
We've been getting smarter about this lately and over time we would have eventually gotten this right. And we've made progress on the Solaris side, so overall this was not going to bankrupt the company. But it has stunted one of the key growth markets for us and helped to keep us in the "expensive, proprietary system" box that our competitors painted for us, so it has contributed to our lackluster stock performance. For this and other reasons, it is my #10 Reason for Sun to be Setting.
Posted on: Apr 24, 2009
Posted by: dbaigent
Category: Sun
Comments:
No, the LX50 was not the first. Sun386i was - yes, off your main point here, but it's nice to know your past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun386i
Posted by RNC on April 24, 2009 at 09:34 AM PDT #
You're right RNC. Thanks for keeping me honest.
Posted by dbaigent on April 24, 2009 at 10:14 AM PDT #
Can you comment a bit, how x86 affected your SPARC sales? Did you loose a lot of SPARC64 or Niagara customers because of your x64 offerings?
Thanks
Posted by Dennis on April 25, 2009 at 01:10 AM PDT #
Dennis,
There have clearly been circumstances where a customer who would otherwise have purchased a SPARC-based system instead chose to buy an x64-based system, but that was rarely because Sun offered one. In other words, it was rare for Sun to "lose" a SPARC-based system sale because of our own x64 offerings. More often, a customer would show a preference for x64 (for real or imagined benefits of that system architecture) and by having an x64-based offering, Sun could keep that customer. The problem in my mind was that our x64 strategy prevented us from truly leveraging x64 to gain new customers, nit that it cost us any existing customers.
Posted by dbaigent on April 25, 2009 at 05:43 PM PDT #
I had a 386i, it was 20 grand list, but I bought it for 500 quid. It cam
Messing with the Java Brand
Much has been said and will be said about how Sun "blew it" with Java - mostly around the lack of contribution by the technology to Sun's bottom line. But this #9 reason for the Setting Sun is not so much about lack of Java revenue (that's actually a rather complicated story), but rather about the numerous attempts by well-meaning marketing folks at Sun to try exploit the value of the Java brand itself and how that ultimately reduced the very value they tried to exploit. To some degree, this is as much about the lack of value in the Sun brand (at least outside our loyal customer base) as it is about Java. After all, if we had sufficient value in the Sun brand there would be no need to try to leverage the Java brand in other areas. But I believe our attempts to leverage the hard-fought value of the Java brand ultimately back-fired, diminishing both the Sun brand and the Java brand.
In the earlier days of Java, the technology was managed by an independent "operating company" called JavaSoft, with its own marketing, sales, products and brand management. There were numerous discussions and debates within JavaSoft about the use of the Java brand and for the most part there was a strong focus on associating the brand with the promise of the technology - that old idea of "write once, run anywhere". There were several brand campaigns around Java - there was the concept of "Java Compatible" for licensees of the technology, "100% Pure Java" for application providers, "Java Powered" for devices, etc. - some of which were very successful, others were branding duds. But there was always a careful consideration of the term "Java" and how we would allow it to be used - both internally and externally.
Fast forward to around 2003 and Sun is struggling to regain its former dot-com glory. We're coming off the painful Netscape-AOL alliance (more on that later) and we're struggling to find a way to express our remarkably robust software assets through a brand. We'd abandoned the confused "iPlanet" brand (which suffered from under-promotion and a "who's your daddy" syndrome between Sun and AOL) and were struggling with the equally confusing and under-promoted "Sun ONE" brand. We were also in one of our many post-dot-com-bubble austerity programs, so heavy investment in any brand was not likely to get funded. I can only assume that the branding discussion (which I was not part of) went something like this:
What's the answer to our branding problem? Java! It's already one of the most recognizable brands in the world and we own it outright. Confused about what Sun ONE Application Server is? Call it the Java Application Server and problem solved! Well, wait - not quite. We can't really call it Java Application Server - that's already an industry standard term for Java EE implementations like IBM's Websphere and BEA's Weblogic and we don't want to further promote them. So let's call it Sun Java Application Server! Wait - hold on. That's likely to get confused with Sun's Java Application Server, which isn't very "brandy" and would be like saying "Sun's Operating System" for Solaris. Not good. Okay - how about Sun Java System Application Server! Yeah! That means it's not just an Application Server, but it is part of a system! Great! All our software is part of a "system"! Now we have a convention for all our software assets! The Sun Java System (fill in your product function here)!
This lead to a proliferation of product names like Sun Java System Access Manager, Sun Java System Identity Manager, Sun Java System Directory Proxy Server, Sun Java System Web Proxy Server and on and on. The problem was not only was this a messy and cumbersome branding campaign, it was diluting the Java brand both within it's own convoluted convention and the broader technology market. Did Sun Java System Web Proxy Server have any Java in it at all? Did it manage the proxies of a Java web server or any web server? And if Sun was not going to use the Java brand to describe Java technologies, why would anyone els
Fumbling Jini
Just an aside...
Before I go any further, let me just admit up front that I have a specific software bias in my perspective. Most bean-counter analysts will rightly say that the primary reason for Sun to be setting is that we didn't keep our stock price up and that we could have through a variety of financial measures, most notably more lay-offs. But in my opinion, the ability to keep the stock price up is directly related to how a company exploits all its market advantages over time, and I believe that the primary failures for Sun are in the areas of exploiting its software assets, not in a lack of aggressive job cuts.
Building to the "Next Big Thing"
When I joined Sun in January of 1997, Java technology had already transformed Sun from a technical workstation and server company into a software powerhouse. The 1997 JavaONE conference was the largest software developer conference ever held at the time. And Sun was charting an aggressive course for the technology, introducing Java Beans, JDBC, Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT), PersonalJava, EmbeddedJava, JavaCard, Enterprise Java Beans, Java Naming and Directory Interfaces, and on and on. And we quietly introduced something called Remote Method Invocation, or RMI. Interestingly, RMI, (along with another interface called Java Native Interface, or JNI), was one of the two aspects of Java 1.1 that Microsoft found so threatening that they refused to implement them in their Java 1.1.4 runtime, causing Sun to sue Microsoft over breach of contract.
RMI is actually a relatively innocuous technology that allows the Java software components (called "objects") in one Java environment (called a "virtual machine", or VM) to talk to Java objects running in another VM. This type of process enables something called "distributed computing", a concept that had been around for years in various forms (some of the more common ones were Common Object Request Broker Architecture, or CORBA, and Microsoft's own Component Object Model Plus, or COM+). Distributed computing enabled software systems to become distributed around a network and still cooperate in solving a given compute task. RMI introduced a Java-specific way to accomplish this and it turns out that by having the same type of objects on both sides of a distributed computing model, the whole process became much simpler and more powerful (CORBA and COM+ allowed objects of different types, like Visual Basic and COBOL, to talk to one another and required a complex set of request brokers and foreknowledge of the application in order to work). What was needed was some form of dynamic finding service where Java objects could register themselves and, using Java-specific capabilities like Reflection and Introspection, determine how to interact with one another at run-time.
Jini Jumps out of the Wrong Bottle
In 1998, Sun introduced something we called Jini. According to and interview with Bill Joy in Wired Magazine, "The Net made it possible. Java made it doable. Jini might just make it happen". What was "it"? It was the idea that the Network really could become the Computer, making Sun's long quoted catch phrase a reality. It was the idea that if every computing device in a network could run Java and RMI, then creating networks of applications that could easily describe themselves, broadcast their capabilities to the network and join up with other devices to create distributed compute networks would be greatly simplified. And by doing it all in Java, it could be programmatic and automated. Jini was the architecture that made the value of Java running everywhere leveragable. And don't forget that Bill Joy was Sun's resident genius and a strong proponent of both the idea of Jini and its development.
So what happened? How could a technology that was the brain child of Sun's resident genius and part of what Microsoft considered to be such a threat end up as a barely noticed project run by Apache? One obvious answer is that, like so many Sun products and technologies, it was a solution
He lives on the fork of spacetime where IBM bought Sun and people like using Notes.
At #1, I'd put a board of directors that not only gave Schwartz the top job, but let him keep it after losing the bulk of their market cap.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Red Hat has a higher P/E ratio because their growth prospects are better than sun's. Nothing illogical about that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."