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Comment by jasallen | Hacker News Reader

> Has there ever been a bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker managed to preside over?

Sun Microsystems

Sun made $200 billion of revenue over 28 years. Yes, Sun missed opportunities -- but (as someone who worked at Sun during the internet boom) Sun definitely took advantage of plenty of them. Or are you making the case that Sun's technological output was so substantial that the $200 billion over the nearly three decades represents a "bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker"?

In 1999 I wanted to buy a Sun SPARCstation 5 (I worked with those). Was fabulous how that machine never blocked, was super-stable, and fast. At that time I had a linux PC box (red hat) at home, with IDE and PATA (if I remember correctly) it was really difficult for the hardware to perform.

Yeah, anything was better than ISA and IDE. But a PC with PCI and SCSI was much closer to SPARC/Alpha/MIPS/etc. performance at 1/Nth the price.

The were good machines, but they were stupidly expensive a that time. The same with SGI. I remember being quoted $18,000 for equivalent amount of memory I had just put in a linux box of my own for about $300. Sure, it wasn't really apples to apples ... but still. Intel based machines were eating their lunch for good reason.

They should have targeted a premium around what Apple charges for their hardware, not the absurd multiple they were charging.

Both sun and sgi had business models built around premium margins and couldn’t adapt the the mammals underfoot. This phenomenon is one of the things that The Innovator’s Dilemma got right.

Apple’s in a slightly different position in that they bank a more profit sun/sgi ever did and are pretty aggressive on COGS so if/when they lose their exalted position they will have a lot more room to maneuver. This is how Microsoft managed to survive its sag (decline is too strong anword) towards irrelevance and recover.

IBM was in the same situation as Microsoft but though Gerstner managed to right the ship, his successors were not able to re-ignite growth (to mix metaphors)

It always felt to me like Sun had great ideas and vision but was too early or idealistic. Seems like they would have missed at least $200 billion in revenue with follow through. Sun Grid is the AWS that never was. Chromebooks are the new Sun Rays.

I would argue that Sun's innovative output was a much larger missed opportunity than anything Docker has developed (then again, hindsight is 20-20). Yes, Docker has a lot of hype and has "brought containers to the masses" but I would argue it's nowhere near as revolutionary as ZFS/Zones/DTrace/etc. If I had been born 10-15 years earlier, I would've hoped to work for Sun. I've never wished to work for Docker.

As someone who maintains the container runtime underlying Docker (and contributes all over the stack), in my view there is a lot more innovative "core" engineering happening in the LXC/LXD camp than in the Docker camp. There are far more kernel patches coming out of LXC (and more kernel maintainers developing LXC) than have come out of Docker. And let's not forget, LXC came first to modern Linux containers. There is a lot of work going into Docker, but I guess I put more of an emphasis on OS engineering to determine who more innovative engineering on systems tools.

(Yes, there is Kubernetes but that's not a Docker project. If anything, Swarm emphasises my point. LXD has clustering too and they support real live migration between cluster nodes -- though CRIU has historically been a bit hairy.)

The tragedy of Sun is that they missed the opportunity to smite System V.

No offense to all the great people working at Docker over the years-- but after they came to see us right after they raised their series B, it immediately occurred to me that they had hired _all_ of the wrong people. I don't recall having had that visceral of a reaction like that with any other company. I think from the beginning they didn't really have a plan and it really showed IMO.

Xerox PARC!

Do you want to elaborate?

Java.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ from 2002 talks about it a bit:

> Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun’s two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and [write-once-run-anywhere]. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down?

Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it.

>Sun had all sorts of good tech, worth paying for, and couldn't figure out how to make people pay for it.

Sun had excellent engineers but no adults in the room focused on selling the tech or making money. They got drunk off the dotbomb cash influx. They saw that they needed to open source Solaris to properly compete with Linux (and arguably they weren't too late) - but they didn't actually have a plan to make MONEY off that. You can't both give away all your software while simultaneously trying to switch to x86 hardware at the time when x86 had already become a race to the bottom...

The E10K -- the former Cray Business Systems Division purchased from SGI for a pittance -- made $1.2B in its first year as a product, and probably still stands as one of the most profitable acquisitions in the history of the industry. (And was due entirely to the adults in the room.) Yes, Sun was badly disrupted by x86 -- but not being able to adapt to economic disruption is really not the same as not being able to "figure out how to make people pay for it." (Indeed, those most fixated on immediate revenue are those for whom economic disruption is most difficult to counter.)

To be clear: Sun lost a microprocessor war first and foremost. In my opinion, Sun needed to respond to x86 by being even more iconoclastic than the company had the stomach for at the time: by buying AMD ca. 2004 and fighting the Intel cross-patent poison pill in court. So in the end, Sun's problem was arguably too many adults in the room, not too few...

The "Innovator's Dilemma" basically. Sun threw gasoline on the fire by giving everything away, but it would have happened anyway.

Buying AMD would have been great.

There's always more to the (inside) story. Meaning I have no idea what's going, so should stay humble if I can't keep my mouth shut.

James Gosling's shared one theory for the downfall of Sun: radioactive packaging of the hot new UltraSparc-II chips cost the company billions.

http://nighthacks.com/jag/blog/336/index.html

I so wish Sun had survived. Jini, JavaSpaces, JXTA, grid computing... I recently had to do some AWS Lambda work (serverless & nodejs) and wanted to kill myself.

Thank you for sharing your views, theories. It's actually therapeutic.

For the curious:

> It was deeply random. It's very randomness suggested that maybe it was a physics problem: maybe it was alpha particles or cosmic rays. Maybe it was machines close to nuclear power plants. One site experiencing problems was near Fermilab. We actually mapped out failures geographically to see if they correlated to such particle sources. Nope. In desperation, a bright hardware engineer decided to measure the radioactivity of the systems themselves. Bingo! Particles! But from where? Much detailed scanning and it turned out that the packaging of the cache ram chips we were using was noticeably radioactive.

There are a few details Gosling left out: Sun trusted those chips enough to omit parity or ECC that would have smoked out the problem early, Sun reversed whatever growing trust it had been earning in enterprise space by blaming the customer and for some time making them sign NDAs to work on the problem, and Sun had engineered their sales so that they only did direct for enterprise sized purchases.

They had really good x86 hardware at a time when the post-dot.com crash wave of companies was getting started, but the sales channels were what you could charge on a credit card on their site, and VARs and the like which usually wouldn't sell to startups. Dell got a great deal of that business because they actually wanted to sell, and by the time these companies' hardware fleets got big enough for enterprise sized orders they'd long mastered how to run Dell or whatever systems to provide a reliable service.

James only has a fraction of the story there. Yes, the alpha emitter (it was radioactive boron) that had contaminated our supplier's SRAM was a serious contributing factor to the (dreaded, infamous, triggering) e-cache parity error on UltraSPARC-II that itself was a major drag on the business. No, it wasn't the only factor (there were many, sadly -- the e-cache parity error represented multiple failures at nearly every level of the system) and no, the e-cache parity error didn't alone change the fundamentals of the business -- but it definitely didn't help!

Missed opportunity or a contribution to where we are now?

I don’t reckon any of them failed, they succeeded in an unexpected way.

don't make me cry

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