Comment by jph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jph | Hacker News Reader

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Sun employee here. What killed Sun wasn't Oracle -- it was Sun management's absolutely incorrect focus on selling hardware over software, and especially over information.

Solaris, Java, and JavaSoft software were always treated as second-class citizens, even though the tech was awesome.

Think of zfs, dtrace, zones, the jvm, jini, openoffice, mysql, and much more. Great tech, yet sometimes the UI/UX/DX was subpar, enhancements were slow, and critical bug fixes took too long with too little transparency. The writing was on the wall in 2000, when many engineers left and the stock dove.

Sun was a great place to work with enormous creativity and super-smart tech folks. Sun promoted "the network is the computer" and if Sun had chosen to truly aim for this -- for the value of network information access, rather than the sale of big iron -- then I truly believe Sun would be the #1 Internet company today.

Thanks for the memories - jh@sun.com

Maybe the purchase wasn't that bad, now the Sun people are pouring into other companies and their wisdom gets spread more evenly

> selling hardware over software, and especially over information.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion. Isn't that true IBM is in the same boat? Somehow it manages to do just fine. Apple is also a mainly hardware company with awesome software.

At the end of the day, it comes to management and leadership. Software or hardware is less irrelevant.

Isn't that true IBM is in the same boat?

It's not. IBM quite deliberately transitioned to making money off things that aren't hardware - services, software, etc.

I would argue that Apple's core competency isn't hardware but the Apple "experience". In the same way that Google uses search to sell ads, Apple uses the hardware it sells to sell everything that goes with it: music, iCloud, software, accessories, etc.

I didn't get the feeling that was the Sun business model, but I didn't follow it super closely.

Did you just say awesome software with a straight face?

Have you ever used iTunes or Safari?

It's hard to change those things, it gets ingrained in the culture of the organisation.

You would think Oracle would have been able to deal with that but they only seem to know how to agitate people.

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