Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
Apple begs to differ.
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?
One problem is that the very latest SPARC chips ("CoolThreads") are outperformed on a per-core basis by the much cheaper Intel Core i7.
A fairly nice 16-core Core i7 motherboard/CPUs/RAM config will cost around $1000. Sure, you'll have to add disks, a case to put it in, etc., but those costs are essentially the same regardless of what CPU architecture is being used. And, you can get the Intel system from a variety of vendors (HP, Dell, etc.).
The SPARC version will cost closer to $4000 (tough to call, because you can't get the raw motherboard), and run at 1.4GHz instead of 2.66GHz.
Then there's virtualization, which Sun uses to claim SPARC is lower cost because it comes free while you must pay $4000+ for x86 virtualization on an equivalent system. One problem with this claim is that SPARC only allows you to virtualize Solaris, while x86 virtualization allows you to virtualize Windows, BSD, Linux, etc. The second problem is that there are many free hypervisors for x86 that are as good as the one included with Solaris...it's only the enterprise-class easy-to-manage ones that cost money.
As we feared: he was trying to be an open source.
Now he's closed.
Heh. Deserving of the "funny" mod, and like a lot of humor, based on a lot of truth.
Back in the years either side of 1990, I worked on a number of projects building software packages on workstations, and mostly I worked on Suns. One of the fun parts was all the people asking why we'd go with such an expensive machine, when you could get cheaper workstations with the same capabilities. But what happened repeatedly was: The guys working on the cheaper machines would be busy tracking down a bug, and the evidence led them into the system (libraries or OS). They'd ask the support people, and the answer would be "We can't tell you; that's proprietary."
Meanwhile, we Sun geeks would handle such things by asking questions on the various relevant mailing lists and newsgroups. More often than not, answers would be posted by Sun engineers, who were encouraged to follow the forums. Fairly often, a Sun guy would simply offer to send us the relevant source code as an explanation. Often, they'd explain that it was too much code to just post on a list, but anyone who asked would get the code in their email. Sun wasn't officially open-source, but they'd figured out that helping developers understand the innards was good for business. And it was, because inevitably we'd have stuff running on the Sun boxes long before the teams working on the "proprietary" systems. Having working deliverables is always better than not having them, even if they're more expensive.
But during the 1990s, this situation slowly disappeared. Sun slowly took their stuff proprietary, and developing significant software started running up against the brick wall of trade secrecy. But systems like linux and the *BSDs came along to replace Sun, giving us the access to internals that Sun no longer allowed.
Note that part of Sun's early success was that the code was sent "warts and all". Sun engineers were quite open about what it could do and what it couldn't. It was common to get warnings from the Sun guys that certain parts hadn't been tested much, and we should expect bugs. This sort of thing horrifies marketing people, but it was what made us trust Sun and choose their platform for our packages. And again, when Sun drifted toward not being as open about their stuff's problems, that told us developers that we could no longer trust them for the information we needed to get our stuff working. So we moved to the open systems where people post criticisms and bug reports openly.
It doesn't surprise me that Sun has lost its original position as a high-quality deveopment platform. It doesn't surprise me that they wouldn't want their people publishing criticisms of Sun's products. But those things long ago moved Sun from the "friendly and honest little company" category into the "untrustworthy big business" category in my mind and in the minds of a lot of developers.
Someday the same thing will happen with the major linux distros, and we'll respond the same way. Not with a big fuss, but by just quietly walking away and adopting other systems.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.