Before Stadia: Why Sun's Sunray Tech Failed

I was involved in a project to use Sunrays as terminals to search the online catalog (OPAC) at a university library. I had two rays in my cubicle and also a tower SPARC server under my desk. (We were a Sun shop, the OPAC ran on a SPARC server, we even got x86 servers from Sun.)

What killed it for us was we could not get a modern (at the time) web browser to run on Solaris. Netscape was way too old, but we couldn't compile Mozilla on Solaris.

When I got my first legit Unix account the world revolved around Sun and you could count on any open source compiling easily on Solaris but the center of rotation had moved to Linux circa 2005 and you could spend hours figuring out how to build things for Solaris...

I was at a very large Sun customer at the time. Sun's account team tried pushing these for years, and to be fair it was an intriguing solution.

The problem? Our developer UNIX workstations were never centrally managed (or budgeted) or in great quantity, so IT management wasn't pushing it. Developers didn't want to give up their personal machines. (And they didn't trust any replacement.) Sysadmins didn't want to kick over a hornet's nest of conversion and support issues.

All that said, even if Stadia isn't there today, it has a very clear potential with scenes that would otherwise exceed console capabilities. It could even significantly improve player-to-player latency in massively multiplayer environments. The initial end-user cost of Stadia is quite low, making it easy to try and at least a short-term alternative to purchasing the next generation console. As a PC gamer, I'd be willing to try it out if it granted me access to titles that I couldn't get on my PC.

Despite any number of "could-be" advantages, we'll have to wait and see how it all pans out. Will Google give it five years to blossom before they grow bored and take the knife to it? Unfortunately, I (like many others) have an ISP with a bandwidth cap, so the entire thing is pretty much a non-starter.