You're a dick, and I bet the only woman to have ever kissed you was you mother.
I saw here a bunch of people that made it seem condom or pill were the only options. For those of us in long term relationships that don't want more or any kids for the moment the IUD should be considered. I just wanted to give a first hand account. And when you have an adult relationship you will learn about how things affect your lover. You care about them after all. It does not make me pussy-whipped, it makes me mature. There were a lot of negatives to the pill, it hurt me to see my wife going through that, so we tried something else. I also gave some details about unexpected benefits to the IUD. An unexpected benefit to the pill was great skin, you don't hear about that often either.
My wife had a Mirena inserted four years ago. She had a few days of cramping. After that things have been fine. She also used to have terrible cramping, bleeding, and mood swings related to her period. All of that has greatly reduced as well. Also she has not gained weight like she did on an oral contraceptive (I've already mentioned the improvement of the mood swings on this IUD, the pill was the opposite). There are some risks, ask a doctor or read the warnings. The only downside during the act is that in some cases the man can feel a poke from the string, personally I would not call it painful and it is a good indication that we are going too deep and about to hurt her so it's actually a positive.
Dover had a reprint of this in the 1960s. You get a feel by reading this of the creation of modern chemistry and debunking of phlogiston theory. It is fascinating from a history of science perspective and you see the modern scientific method in practice in a rigorous way possibly for the first time.
Also the pollution in and around Mexico city. Various reports on respiratory problems in Mexico city say things like 8-20% higher cases of asthma and respiratory related deaths. That might have something to do with why this flu killed so many people there and in the mountains to the east.
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
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
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.
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
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
Wow there are some great replies here, I don't know where to reply, so I will just do it up here. My father started a consulting/engineering/drafting company in 1988. I was enamored with Sun3s at the time and really was impressed by what I was reading about the Sun4s. I heard about the Sun386i and told my father about it. He contacted Sun and got a quote for almost $10K per machine. This was for a beefy one that had a very high res accelerated 8-bit display, 16MB RAM and 130 MB or so of disk. The Sun sales guy looked into some stuff and got back to him that WP, L 123, and AT dBase would run fine in what did they call it DOS/vx or something like that but not AD AutoCAD due to how video was handled but there was this new fangled program Pro/E that should be available within the year on i386. My father was not impressed at all with that. Then the sales guy suggested Sun3s and Pro/E and just getting an IBM AT clone or two for the other software. My father ended-up buying some beefy 386 boxes with lower res not accelerated cards, 80 MB HD, and 2 MB RAM for just under $4K. Don't even get me started on the prices for the Sun monitors, my father just got some very nice NEC ones that took BNC unlike the proprietary Sun connector.
Also Sun was not particularly cheaper than any of the other big names back then. They were cheaper than IBM and VMS though and I guess that is what counted. AT&T had some attractive prices and small boxes in particular.
I hate how someone always brings this up. It was because of patents and that it needed to be based per file that the CDDL was made. There was no anti Linux conspiracy. It is not incompatible with the GPL, the GPL is incompatible with the CDDL because of demands that the GPL makes in its text. I was there at the time working down the hall from a person very involved with CDDL and open sourcing solaris. There was another person at Sun that made some comments that were frankly lies when no longer an employee and all the FUD about that stems from that.
What happened is it was a short sighted save our jobs not their jobs issue. The suits in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale saw that cuts were coming. They were able to convince people including Zander that a great way to save money was to kill Solaris/x86, it had been suffering for years already due to limited staff and budget. Again the reason was that the people doing sparc and asic were afraid so that is why solaris/x86 was kept in such a sorry state. Heck they even had the people doing a large chunk of the x86 work in LA away from the rest of ON in Menlo Park.
Anyway solaris/x86 was EOLed and almost everyone in LA working on it lost their jobs or got reassigned. But at almost the moment that solaris/x86 was EOLed there was quite a strong grassroots uprising outside of Sun about this, and it simply became impossible to not take notice. When Zander left, the correct direction was taken by embracing amd64.
When I was there I did some x86 work. Hammer was announced. I voiced an opinion that we should get involved, and boy did that open a can of worms. Eventually through a contact at AMD in the UK I was able to get a person in Sun and a person at AMD to get in touch and we were sent three prototype Hammer boxes. What did those rascals at Sun do? They had them transferred to the SUNWpro (compilers) people instead. No they did not get one to them, one to ON (OS/Networking), and one to the x86 people in LA. The compiler group just sat on them. That infuriated me at the time and shortly after that I started looking for a new job pretty much entirely due to my disgust with how that was handled.
Here is another nugget, a second level manager told me to distance myself as much as possible from x86 just before it was announced that solaris/x86 was EOLed.
That is the sort of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level managerial thinking that was the root cause of all of Suns poor decisions over the last ten years. They were always thinking about how best to serve their own group dept div instead of what was best long term.
I was lucky, my parents had a 19" Sony Trinitron in '82. The image quality was much much better than this. I had a friend at the time that had a Zenith and even that looked better than this. This project took the effect much to far.
Also the images have no ringing. That is the effect when there was a high luminance area on the left with a sharp transition to a low luminance area to its right. There would a pattern of vertical lines at diminishing distances and with diminishing brightness from that edge to the right. That was the most annoying effect of systems that used RF modulators.
That same pages says with quad links you get ~40Hz. I used to use 50Hz circa '93-96 on a 14 in CRT with longer lasting phosphors and as long as I used mainly white, green, and amber on black it was okay. LCDs shouldn't flicker much so anything above 30Hz should be very nice even for video.
Personally I cannot wait until the future where I can have two 17in 200 dpi displays on one machine.
That's because a 22 in wide screen of your resolution works out to about 103 dpi. Research shows that at typical eye to monitor distances 200 dpi is where AA is no longer needed.
Drat I just lost my mod points. VLB is a perfect analog to AGP. ISA was not cutting it. A working group was working on a future industry standard. VLB came-out in the meantime. Then the new standard was fleshed-out, in the end everything moved to it. The new standard was PCI.
In the case of AGP, do a mad libs of the above with PCI, AGP, and PCIe.
"To be fair, every OS that I've ever dealt with has had issues with major upgrades. Whether it's glibc problems with older Linux binaries, or compatibility and driver problems moving to newer versions of Windows, there's always pain."
I just fired-up a bunch of programs I compiled while in college on a number of Solaris boxes ranging from 2.5, 2.5.1, and 2.6 and they all ran perfectly fine just now on Solaris 10. That is a span of something like 15 years of compatibility. So if your OS decides to do things like change the way thread local storage is done, add international support in a non backwards compatible way, move from COFF to ELF, then in ELF change and extend the format of the relocation entries, not to mention use a C++ tool chain that keeps modifying the ABI, then yeah you really have no recourse. Oh and Solaris has not really changed the device driver model much from SunOS 4.x, pretty much any driver (well it has to be 64-bit for a 64-bit kernel) from 2.6 is going to work in Solaris 10, unless it used something esoteric, going back before then will need some minor tweaks to some structures. Check out the man pages in section 9E or the funtions that start with 'ddi' sometime (alternately http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-3196/ )
Hmm you live in a fairytale don't you. Sadly the Windows drivers I have had the pleasure of maintaining all have a dmabuf.c file with a large array that gets bzero'ed in init(). I think you do not realize just how hackish most drivers are, there seems to be tradition of code like that for Windows. The people that have been around the block a few more times than me tell me of the horrors of huge far tiny and win16 and I shudder.
Actually it would be even simpler (devil's in the details of course) for USB than you think. The host would fake two NEC OHCI chips (one for USB 1.1 and one for firewire) and an Intel EHCI chip. To the guest there would just be the typical memory mapped registers the current driver expects. They would be just mapped to memory where the page would be read only and the host could trap when the guest tried to do anything. Then the host would do the right stuff using the Vista drivers.
The nice thing about Windows 7 in relation to media is that MS provides a much wider selection of audio and video codecs and splitters for more containers than ever before. That is nice for those that are not into using things like mplayer, vlc, or ffdshow. The bad thing is that somehow Windows 7 treats the system supplied ones as special so things like ffdshow and Maali media splitter stopped working, the MS provided stuff was always used first. By now I think the devs have a handle on stuff like this but it was a pain in the neck. It required changes in a portion of the registry that admin users could not change, SetACL needed to be used to allow modification first:
There are reasons you might want to use the non-MS stuff. For example the system provided ones seem to be more resource intensive than the alternatives, for example if you have an NV card and CoreAVC (which you had to pay money for) or ffmpeg-mt. The system supplied stuff does not seem to understand chapters in MKV and MP4. There is not a nice way to have subtitles automatically superimposed on your video.
I have an xbox360 and 64-bit WMC TV Pack 2008. When I installed the 32-bit and 64-bit ffdshow stuff plus some beta 64-bit splitters everything works relatively well in WMC (64-bit) and WMP (32-bit, at least the one on the desktop). But there are still little annoyances. For example I cannot watch subtitles, skipping to chapters does not work, nor does FF in WMC. There are some ways to cobble those things in, but they did not work too well for me. Personally I am a big fan of ffmpeg-mt builds of mplayer and the SMPlayer skin on Windows instead. The other thing that is not so great about using the xbox360 with WMC is that in Vista the WMC does no transcoding, so if the Xbox360 dashboard cannot play the video file, you will not be able to watch it on the xbox360 from your library on the PC. Windows 7 adds this transcoding feature. What the xbox360 is good for is when my son plays RCT3 on the PC, then my wife can watch TV shows she has recorded on the xbox360.
If the rumors were true the N64 sold at a loss shortly after launch due to RAM price increase. Shorty after that the RAM prices dropped again. Other than that Nintendo never sold a console at a loss.
Slashdot Mirror
You're a dick, and I bet the only woman to have ever kissed you was you mother.
I saw here a bunch of people that made it seem condom or pill were the only options. For those of us in long term relationships that don't want more or any kids for the moment the IUD should be considered. I just wanted to give a first hand account. And when you have an adult relationship you will learn about how things affect your lover. You care about them after all. It does not make me pussy-whipped, it makes me mature. There were a lot of negatives to the pill, it hurt me to see my wife going through that, so we tried something else. I also gave some details about unexpected benefits to the IUD. An unexpected benefit to the pill was great skin, you don't hear about that often either.
Go buy a real doll, it's your only hope.
My wife had a Mirena inserted four years ago. She had a few days of cramping. After that things have been fine. She also used to have terrible cramping, bleeding, and mood swings related to her period. All of that has greatly reduced as well. Also she has not gained weight like she did on an oral contraceptive (I've already mentioned the improvement of the mood swings on this IUD, the pill was the opposite). There are some risks, ask a doctor or read the warnings. The only downside during the act is that in some cases the man can feel a poke from the string, personally I would not call it painful and it is a good indication that we are going too deep and about to hurt her so it's actually a positive.
translated to English by Robert Kerr in 1790
Dover had a reprint of this in the 1960s. You get a feel by reading this of the creation of modern chemistry and debunking of phlogiston theory. It is fascinating from a history of science perspective and you see the modern scientific method in practice in a rigorous way possibly for the first time.
Also the pollution in and around Mexico city. Various reports on respiratory problems in Mexico city say things like 8-20% higher cases of asthma and respiratory related deaths. That might have something to do with why this flu killed so many people there and in the mountains to the east.
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
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
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
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
Ha! When things were going great at Sun we got free t-shirts and why yes there was free pop in the fridge too.
Wow there are some great replies here, I don't know where to reply, so I will just do it up here. My father started a consulting/engineering/drafting company in 1988. I was enamored with Sun3s at the time and really was impressed by what I was reading about the Sun4s. I heard about the Sun386i and told my father about it. He contacted Sun and got a quote for almost $10K per machine. This was for a beefy one that had a very high res accelerated 8-bit display, 16MB RAM and 130 MB or so of disk. The Sun sales guy looked into some stuff and got back to him that WP, L 123, and AT dBase would run fine in what did they call it DOS/vx or something like that but not AD AutoCAD due to how video was handled but there was this new fangled program Pro/E that should be available within the year on i386. My father was not impressed at all with that. Then the sales guy suggested Sun3s and Pro/E and just getting an IBM AT clone or two for the other software. My father ended-up buying some beefy 386 boxes with lower res not accelerated cards, 80 MB HD, and 2 MB RAM for just under $4K. Don't even get me started on the prices for the Sun monitors, my father just got some very nice NEC ones that took BNC unlike the proprietary Sun connector.
Also Sun was not particularly cheaper than any of the other big names back then. They were cheaper than IBM and VMS though and I guess that is what counted. AT&T had some attractive prices and small boxes in particular.
I hate how someone always brings this up. It was because of patents and that it needed to be based per file that the CDDL was made. There was no anti Linux conspiracy. It is not incompatible with the GPL, the GPL is incompatible with the CDDL because of demands that the GPL makes in its text. I was there at the time working down the hall from a person very involved with CDDL and open sourcing solaris. There was another person at Sun that made some comments that were frankly lies when no longer an employee and all the FUD about that stems from that.
What happened is it was a short sighted save our jobs not their jobs issue. The suits in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale saw that cuts were coming. They were able to convince people including Zander that a great way to save money was to kill Solaris/x86, it had been suffering for years already due to limited staff and budget. Again the reason was that the people doing sparc and asic were afraid so that is why solaris/x86 was kept in such a sorry state. Heck they even had the people doing a large chunk of the x86 work in LA away from the rest of ON in Menlo Park.
Anyway solaris/x86 was EOLed and almost everyone in LA working on it lost their jobs or got reassigned. But at almost the moment that solaris/x86 was EOLed there was quite a strong grassroots uprising outside of Sun about this, and it simply became impossible to not take notice. When Zander left, the correct direction was taken by embracing amd64.
When I was there I did some x86 work. Hammer was announced. I voiced an opinion that we should get involved, and boy did that open a can of worms. Eventually through a contact at AMD in the UK I was able to get a person in Sun and a person at AMD to get in touch and we were sent three prototype Hammer boxes. What did those rascals at Sun do? They had them transferred to the SUNWpro (compilers) people instead. No they did not get one to them, one to ON (OS/Networking), and one to the x86 people in LA. The compiler group just sat on them. That infuriated me at the time and shortly after that I started looking for a new job pretty much entirely due to my disgust with how that was handled.
Here is another nugget, a second level manager told me to distance myself as much as possible from x86 just before it was announced that solaris/x86 was EOLed.
That is the sort of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level managerial thinking that was the root cause of all of Suns poor decisions over the last ten years. They were always thinking about how best to serve their own group dept div instead of what was best long term.
I was lucky, my parents had a 19" Sony Trinitron in '82. The image quality was much much better than this. I had a friend at the time that had a Zenith and even that looked better than this. This project took the effect much to far.
Also the images have no ringing. That is the effect when there was a high luminance area on the left with a sharp transition to a low luminance area to its right. There would a pattern of vertical lines at diminishing distances and with diminishing brightness from that edge to the right. That was the most annoying effect of systems that used RF modulators.
That same pages says with quad links you get ~40Hz. I used to use 50Hz circa '93-96 on a 14 in CRT with longer lasting phosphors and as long as I used mainly white, green, and amber on black it was okay. LCDs shouldn't flicker much so anything above 30Hz should be very nice even for video.
Personally I cannot wait until the future where I can have two 17in 200 dpi displays on one machine.
That's because a 22 in wide screen of your resolution works out to about 103 dpi. Research shows that at typical eye to monitor distances 200 dpi is where AA is no longer needed.
Drat I just lost my mod points. VLB is a perfect analog to AGP. ISA was not cutting it. A working group was working on a future industry standard. VLB came-out in the meantime. Then the new standard was fleshed-out, in the end everything moved to it. The new standard was PCI.
In the case of AGP, do a mad libs of the above with PCI, AGP, and PCIe.
"To be fair, every OS that I've ever dealt with has had issues with major upgrades. Whether it's glibc problems with older Linux binaries, or compatibility and driver problems moving to newer versions of Windows, there's always pain."
I just fired-up a bunch of programs I compiled while in college on a number of Solaris boxes ranging from 2.5, 2.5.1, and 2.6 and they all ran perfectly fine just now on Solaris 10. That is a span of something like 15 years of compatibility. So if your OS decides to do things like change the way thread local storage is done, add international support in a non backwards compatible way, move from COFF to ELF, then in ELF change and extend the format of the relocation entries, not to mention use a C++ tool chain that keeps modifying the ABI, then yeah you really have no recourse. Oh and Solaris has not really changed the device driver model much from SunOS 4.x, pretty much any driver (well it has to be 64-bit for a 64-bit kernel) from 2.6 is going to work in Solaris 10, unless it used something esoteric, going back before then will need some minor tweaks to some structures. Check out the man pages in section 9E or the funtions that start with 'ddi' sometime (alternately http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-3196/ )
Hmm you live in a fairytale don't you. Sadly the Windows drivers I have had the pleasure of maintaining all have a dmabuf.c file with a large array that gets bzero'ed in init(). I think you do not realize just how hackish most drivers are, there seems to be tradition of code like that for Windows. The people that have been around the block a few more times than me tell me of the horrors of huge far tiny and win16 and I shudder.
Actually it would be even simpler (devil's in the details of course) for USB than you think. The host would fake two NEC OHCI chips (one for USB 1.1 and one for firewire) and an Intel EHCI chip. To the guest there would just be the typical memory mapped registers the current driver expects. They would be just mapped to memory where the page would be read only and the host could trap when the guest tried to do anything. Then the host would do the right stuff using the Vista drivers.
The nice thing about Windows 7 in relation to media is that MS provides a much wider selection of audio and video codecs and splitters for more containers than ever before. That is nice for those that are not into using things like mplayer, vlc, or ffdshow. The bad thing is that somehow Windows 7 treats the system supplied ones as special so things like ffdshow and Maali media splitter stopped working, the MS provided stuff was always used first. By now I think the devs have a handle on stuff like this but it was a pain in the neck. It required changes in a portion of the registry that admin users could not change, SetACL needed to be used to allow modification first:
http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-145906.html
There are reasons you might want to use the non-MS stuff. For example the system provided ones seem to be more resource intensive than the alternatives, for example if you have an NV card and CoreAVC (which you had to pay money for) or ffmpeg-mt. The system supplied stuff does not seem to understand chapters in MKV and MP4. There is not a nice way to have subtitles automatically superimposed on your video.
I have an xbox360 and 64-bit WMC TV Pack 2008. When I installed the 32-bit and 64-bit ffdshow stuff plus some beta 64-bit splitters everything works relatively well in WMC (64-bit) and WMP (32-bit, at least the one on the desktop). But there are still little annoyances. For example I cannot watch subtitles, skipping to chapters does not work, nor does FF in WMC. There are some ways to cobble those things in, but they did not work too well for me. Personally I am a big fan of ffmpeg-mt builds of mplayer and the SMPlayer skin on Windows instead. The other thing that is not so great about using the xbox360 with WMC is that in Vista the WMC does no transcoding, so if the Xbox360 dashboard cannot play the video file, you will not be able to watch it on the xbox360 from your library on the PC. Windows 7 adds this transcoding feature. What the xbox360 is good for is when my son plays RCT3 on the PC, then my wife can watch TV shows she has recorded on the xbox360.
If the rumors were true the N64 sold at a loss shortly after launch due to RAM price increase. Shorty after that the RAM prices dropped again. Other than that Nintendo never sold a console at a loss.
Am I the only one here that uses xpdf?
token ring, pfft I regularly use arcnet here, even arcnet over fiber.