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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
As the original article says, "There may be Securities and Exchange-related reasons for shuttering the posts."
...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.
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"
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
Mod me a troll for saying this, but it's the truth so I don't care.
I went to college with one of the current Solaris kernel developers. This was one of the dirtiest people I've ever met. This guy washed himself at most once a week. There was one summer day when I left my dorm room and a I saw some people pissed off down the hall. I started walking towards them when this crippling stench hit me in the face. It was coming from that guy's room. He smelled so awful that everyone in the same alley as that guy's room was enraged by the stench!
One time I went to take a shower but that guy was in the adjoining shower. His underwear was on a bench. It was the most repulsive thing I had ever seen. The thing had a brown crust on the back and a yellow crust on the front. I'm surprised anyone could walk around in those things without them making a crackling noise.
With the people that Sun hires it is not at all surprising the company is going tits up.
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.