What if Sun Microsystems acquired Apple in 1996?
alternatehistory.com
alternatehistory.com
In 1993, Sears exited the mail order business. In 1994, Amazon was founded.
It might have been different. Sears already owned Prodigy. The World Wide Web already existed in the early 1990s. PCs had been available for over 10 years. Modems had reached 28Kb/s. What if Sears had simply put their huge catalog on line and started taking orders? Sears already had the logistics infrastructure for deliveries.
Amazon might never have launched.
Who knows what might have happened if they'd brought all of sears products online for purchase, in their existing standalone prodigy browser software...
The POS system was archaic, even at that time. Nobody trusted inventory counts, it was never accurate. But the website was always worse. Plus we had no workable access to it. It took an eternity to load a page. And what you saw was worthless. Sears treated the website with contempt.
We had a mandatory company wide meeting on a Sunday night. They played a pre recorded message from the CEO telling us how important family was to the company. He was at home with his family. We weren’t. That never registered with Sears.
My job at the time was ostensibly to sell hand tools, or lawn tools, or consumer electronics. But that wasn’t the point at all. We got paid commission. The item was nothing. Maybe 3%, probably less. A few dollars. But a successful Sears card signup? That was a flat $20.00 payout. Add on a warranty? 30% commission on the warranty. Bonuses were paid to management based on the ratio of sales with addons. So for a sales rep like me we will take any sale. But my boss would prefer I not sell a TV at all if I don’t get the warranty.
Sears was a predatory business for decades. I don’t know when they lost their way but it was long before the turn of the century. Modern business would do well to study how Sears failed.
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Inventory counts: have to do 'inventory' (check what's really there), which costs workers and time to verify. Most frequently seen by consumers when a store thinks they have X of something but they really have N (likely zero).
POS: Infrastructure is a cost center... How do you measure the hypothetical losses?
Saturday... video message? WTF kind of cult is this BS?
Maligned incentives. I'm sure ages ago those metrics used to be useful for promotion or something, then they became the literal payment system. No wonder that place felt like a used car showroom for merchandise as they were going out of business.
Sunday. The store closed an hour or two early on Sundays. They had the whole staff come in at 7pm, even if it was our day off.
It was around the time of the Kmart merger so could have been about that. The only thing I recall now was the CEO telling us how important "family" time was, while my dinner got cold at home. Of course "Sears is a family" or somesuch. So yeah, a cult, at least in the c-suite.
> I don’t know how Sears failed so hard
and proceeds to describe exactly why it failed so hard.
BTW, despite all that corporate bullshit one thing should work reliably: inventory. When a customer is physically in the store you can "sorry, actually we don't have $thing in stock" all you want, they can't just teleport to your competitor. In the Internet - they can.
It may have felt like they could do no wrong so why focus on continuing to do right? Why push for excellence when you're already the best?
And once one manager started thinking like that, then another did, and another did, and another...
It's easy to see in the aftermath what factors caused them to fail, but the spirit of the event itself was plain to everyone not caught up in it.
They thought they were invulnerable, and like a teenager wearing a t-shirt on a motorcycle they eventually found out the hard truth.
Amazon isn't anything different. You're bombarded with offers to sign up for the Amazon Visa, "Get $50 off with approval of the Amazon Rewards Visa". They try to sneak in the Asurion warranty. 'Customers who bought this item also bought...' is where they push the high-margin accessories.
They don't make any money on the big items. Nobody ever did. It's the service an accessories.
This is all easy and achievable, should you pursue the path. Incremental improvements onto an existing, ancient, paper-oriented business process are easily possible.
- Print off online orders as facsimile mail-in orders for processing - Prices weren't fancy real-time updates back then, or didn't have to be if they were
You're looking at the state of today and assuming this is as it was on the nascent web.
It wasn't.
Here is the 1986 christmas catalog
https://archive.org/details/1986-sears-christmas-wishbook-ca...
In about 1985 Sears piloted a thing called "Electronistore." You could go into a Sears store and browse the catalog and place orders on a computer (a PC/XT) with a credit card.
The computer setup was very creative. At the time, a PC couldn't really display high quality photos, and there wasn't hard drive capacity for the photos of the Sears catalog anyhow. The solution was to make each product photo a frame on a Laserdisc. The computer was connected to a TV/Monitor that could be electronically commanded to switch inputs between the computer and the laserdisc player. The computer could command the laserdisc player to seek to a certain frame and freeze the frame.
You could browse and search the catalog, and then hit a button and it would show you the picture, then you'd hit another key and go back to the text interface for ordering.
Anyhow they ran the pilot and not too many people used it since you could just use the catalog instead which had all of the same products, so they shut it down and never really returned to e-commerce.
(article about it from the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20201112020112/https://www.chica...)
If you look at the earliest versions of OSX it's NeXT with a macos9 skin on top of it. But it's recognizably NeXT.
Sun bought Lighthouse Design at a time when it invested in NeXT's OpenStep API; in fact, there was a port of OpenStep to Solaris. However, Java ended up taking off around 1995-96, and Sun's strategy changed from supporting OpenStep to promoting Java. Lighthouse Design's software didn't fit in this strategy, and sadly the software has been abandoned, even though Sun was in a great position to polish and update the software when Mac OS X was released.
I understand why Lighthouse Design was sold, though. Before Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, the future for NeXT-based software companies appeared bleak, and these companies faced the challenging prospects of (1) porting their software, implemented using NeXT's then state-of-the-art APIs and tools, to platforms that were more commercially viable yet lacked such tooling, and (2) competing with the 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft; WordPerfect, Lotus, and Claris tried but to no avail; how was Lighthouse Design going to compete against Microsoft? Being a productivity software company was tough in the 1990s; if you targeted mainstream platforms (Mac and Windows) then you had to compete against Microsoft, and if you targeted non-mainstream platforms (OS/2, NeXTSTEP, BeOS), then while you're shielded from competing against Microsoft Office, you're gambling on the success of these platforms (and had these platforms became commercially widespread, Microsoft would have just ported Office to them, anyway).
But the world would have been a better place if IBM had bought Sun instead of Oracle.
Which bring me to this old joke:
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
I am sure if EMC had bought Sun I'd still be there. Sun & EMC were both engineer led organisations in the old days, and the two cultures would have worked well together. (IMHO based on my experience working at EMC and with many many Sun alumni).
Isn't that exactly the problem? Server and storage HW were rapidly getting commodified. That's why the "vacuum cleaner salespeople" of the IT world (Dell, Compaq etc.) won, there's little value add in server HW engineering except at the bottom of the stack (Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, etc.).
For a while I though HP might have a chance on mobile, when they took on webOS. If they could have established a compelling platform stack with hardware, operating system and a decent dev environment they could have had a chance to grow their margins a bit. The problem is I suspect the PC side of HP just wasn't up to it. I had an HP digital camera around that time and it was a bulky, blocky uninspiring lump of a device.
Databases they already had DB2. Informix did not had an happy life after aquisition, so most likely the love for MySQL wouldn't be that great.
And in what concerns Java, IBM has always had their own implementations, with extensions like JIT caches, AOT compilation, real time GC, special flavour of value types (ObjectLayout), so also here little value to get from Sun.
I simply don't see IBM doing what Oracle did and basically stopping OpenSource development.
Maybe you should delve into how much FOSS love there is on IBM when it doesn't fit business targets.
Wishful thinking.
And its not wishful thinking at all. Solaris development was happening in public it was well integrated with the community its not at all crazy to think that at least part of the development team would have continued working in the same way.
There were good products build on top of Solaris technology that IBM would have continue to develop and sell. Those products would not easily be built on top of AIX anytime soon.
IBM didn't need ANOTHER proprietary Unix, why would they go the Oracle route and make it proprietary again? What possible reason would IBM have to do that? The Openness of Solaris was what made it different form their other offerings.
IBM had also invested quite a bit of money in Linux and RedHat is literally part of IBM now. And apparently they have not acted the same as Oracle.
IBM withdraw their offer, because they didn't had any commercial reason to go forward with the deal, and they aren't a charity to start with.
Also interestingly, it was Oracle that turned Solaris into the first commercial UNIX that has successfully tamed C into production, not Sun.
Something that naturally the Oracle haters don't care about.
I kinda wonder what IBM really is these days anyway.
They're a bit of a server manufacturer for some niche stuff. A bit of a CPU manufacturer for some niche uses. A bit of a consultancy operator. A bit of a software supplier. A bit of an operational outsourcer.
They're dabbling in everything yet don't shine at anything. No clear focus. If they didn't have their name and legacy I bet they would have been lost in the waves long ago.
Sun was selling products that could only work on top of Solaris. Had IBM bought Sun they would have continued to sell those products (as they were profitable) and likely continue at least some level of Solaris development to support those products.
They would have a had no reason what so ever to make that further development proprietary.
> tamed C into production
I have no idea what that even means. See has been successful in production on literally millions of computers and server around the world.
And if we are talking about usefulness to production Zones and DTrace are about 1000x more helpful then anything Oracle innovated.
> Something that naturally the Oracle haters don't care about.
Yeah people don't tend to care as much what happens in proprietary OS by shitty vendors.
IBM invented timesharing and containers, no need for Solaris stuff.
The code for it isn't even public so other could learn for it as Oracle made Solaris proprietary again.
> IBM invented timesharing and containers, no need for Solaris stuff.
I'm not sure what you are referring to by containers here. Please tell me where I can find a non-property Unix that allows me to use these amazing IBM containers.
You seem to place equal value on some proprietary system that people can't actually use, and those that made it available to everybody in Open Source.
Call me crazy but I value innovations more that are in the open and available.
Something where Apple, Google and Microsoft are followers, with ARM MTE, PAC and Pluton, while Intel just borked their n attempt at it.
You can educate yourself on AIX LPAR and System 360.
Yes, I do place equal value in commercial stuff, my FOSS zealot days are a behind me, https://xkcd.com/2347/
IBM is struggling with cloud computing. Adding SUN, they would have tried to turn it into a SPARK offer and burned much more resources.
Both SUN and IBM couldn't continue as before. How could IBM have used SUN to create something better?
At SUN's scale, there was no way forward for their OS or their chips. They were too late in open sourcing their OS, which could have created the market for their chips. Oracle did what SUN's management should have done years before.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs chose to build consumer products because that brings the scale to produce chips. It's in IBM's name to serve businesses, not consumers. The cultural change to create the foundation for SUN's hardware business is almost impossible to pull off.
I would like to argue that the world is a better place because Oracle is maintaining Java, something that SUN didn't fully achieve.
Instead of browsers and Javascript, we could have a jvm everywhere. We are building the full stack with technologies like react and virtual DOMs anyway. It's too late for that, but it's in Oracle's own interest to make Java shine.
> Taligent OS and CommonPoint mirrored the sprawling scope of IBM's complementary Workplace OS, in redundantly overlapping attempts to become the ultimate universal system to unify all of the world's computers and operating systems with a single microkernel.
Apparently it a combination of 'Talented' and 'Intelligent'. So what you get apparently is the worst aspect of both organization.
Its like if you would have Sun and Apple merge and you end up building a Sun GUI on top of a System 7 kernel.
> November 8, 1997: Apple released a new version of the Macintosh personal computer yesterday … the MacUltra is powered by a 300 MHz UltraSPARC II microprocessor. The MacUltra is shipped with the “Macintosh Solaris” operating system – a version of Sun’s Solaris OS with a classic Mac OS-derived desktop environment and full compatibility with classic Mac OS application
In 3 Months they switched architectures, integrated a DE on top of a new OS, and wrote an emulator for a new architecture. Impressive.
Steve declined.
About a decade later, Larry acquired Sun.
https://www.cio.com/article/238191/how-larry-ellison-plotted...
Imagine being sued by Apple because of some license condition :)
Trivia: Steve Jobs was Ellison's wedding photographer. Ellison trusted no one except Steve when it came to aesthetics.
I think maybe in the early 90s if Sun had adopted SPARC instead of PowerPC and changed to Salaris giving Sun a real "PC" division. That would have been more sensible.
The more interesting possibility (and more realistic) would have been a merger with SGI. Together maybe they could have both done better. I think had this been done in the 90s putting together the best from Solaris and IRIX (and hopefully Open Source) combined with push for x86 Solaris on PC compatible.
Or more if you want to be really aggressive try to create a lower cost SPARC 'Home Workstation'. Taking on Wintel before Windows 95 might have been possible. Even if only far a small part of a big market.
I'm not sure it matters if Sun buys Apple. Jobs probably ends up taking NeXT in the direction he took Apple upon return.
Steve Jobs is the key to a lot of stuff and the revolution in personal and consumer computing in the 2000's. I don't think it matters what company he does that under.
When I visit any of my 3 kids on their respect campuses. I see the same. Some times even stronger.
I spent time in Boston 2 weeks ago and rode the tubes a lot. I saw a LOT of MacBooks. Way more than all other laptops combined.
I don’t even like apple but you are so incredibly wrong it’s laughable. This might have been true 20 years ago but dude. Apple is huge and it’s personal computing is huge too.
They did make the most of it, and they are definitely the show-off market leader (when you want to show off your laptop, that's what you get ;).
My company recently got me a MacBook Pro 14, and while it's fast, I don't enjoy using it for the same reasons I hated my old XPS13: I hate the keyboard and glossiness of the screen (and sharp edges too). I am a Thinkpad X1 guy, those are machines I happily go back to.
I forget his exact words :-)
NeXT was a pure software company and not a successful one either. The idea that they could start doing things like iPod is pretty out there.
The iconic NeXT cube (and NeXTStations) would disagree with you there.
Its actually kind of crazy how high NEXT got valued.
Despite not being successful, they were well known for their hardware.
The Cube where it was originally developed, was lying on a corner on his office as no one believed it had any future left.
The iPod had some software involvement, but was almost entirely a hardware play. It used an unusually capable small hard drive that Apple bought all of and in the early versions made use of Firewire for ease of use and quick transfers. All of the software for controlling it was contracted out to a company outside Apple that specialized in embedded applications which are really different from applications on home computers or workstations.
Sun was professional, Jobs was consumer. Jobs needed to be top dog and in charge of concept, and he couldn't have done that at Sun. He also needed some constraints and consumer focus, which Apple provided.
NeXT was basically a vanity project. It was poorly run from a business POV, but developed some decent tech. The real primary motivation wasn't to make money, it was to keep some attention on Jobs and maintain his profile as an Important Innovative Person.
Sun was engineering-led not image-led and wedded to workstation/server. That market turned out to be a relatively short-lived spasm - a legacy of the mini market pioneered by DEC - in a much longer consumer-oriented tech history.
So there was an impossible tension there.
It might have worked if Apple had remained a completely independent division and Jobs had been given a free hand to run it. But that was never really remotely likely.
It might also have worked if Jobs had any interest in the server/business market. But he really didn't - possibly because it was "boring" and not mass market, which meant less attention and praise for him.
For consumer mobile in 1996, maybe they'd think more like Internet-connected handhelds based on HotJava (Web browser with Java-based content handlers installed on-the-fly, in this case partly for networking efficiency, partly disconnected operation, partly promotng their vision of Web). While also making compatible HotJava browser available for all the popular desktop platforms. (And JavaScript never took over.)
But for corporate IT customers, they might still push more their your-desktop-everywhere thin client ideas, of course served by Sun servers in the data centers. But also based on Java.
Sun are obviously best known for their Sparc systems, but their x86 workstations were beautiful and well ahead of their time in terms of serviceability. The classic design would still look modern today.
The Ultra 2x/4x series looked great: http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/ultra_20m2/
IMO the best implementation of the design came in the SPARC versions where the optical drive and IO were combined in to one 5.25" bay (e.g. Ultra 25, pg 4: http://archives.retrobridge.org/sun/system-handbook/3.4/Syst...).
Though I wonder, who bought these over similar Dell/HP/etc boxes? Did they have any special features or was it mostly just about them running Solaris first-party?
When servers got going again, price became absolutely key and Linux had become so good it made solaris seem like yesterdays news.
I do like this alternative timeline, but if Apple went Solaris it wouldn't have surprised me if Microsoft did a linux distro in the early 2000s which would have really made for a strange future.
Some of their x86 AMD server were pretty good.
> When servers got going again, price became absolutely key and Linux had become so good it made solaris seem like yesterdays news.
Technically this is very questionable. I would argue Solaris was way ahead at that point.
> I do like this alternative timeline, but if Apple went Solaris it wouldn't have surprised me if Microsoft did a linux distro in the early 2000s which would have really made for a strange future.
Not sure I understand that logic.
Back then, Microsoft saw sun as a major competitor, I don't think its out of the question they would have tried selling Unix again. They did in the 1980s.
> Back then, Microsoft saw sun as a major competitor, I don't think its out of the question they would have tried selling Unix again. They did in the 1980s.
I don't really see it. The competition was mostly in the server space. If Microsoft wanted to adopt UNIX to compete why would Sun buying Apple have change anything?
Did HP actually made any tape hardware themselves? At least with LTO my impression was what everyone just OEMed from Quanta.
I always believed the net effect of this would be that Microsoft would suddenly have to do an about face and support one of the OSS compiler chains, probably GCC. At the time, they had a current Mach-compiled version of Windows that was still being maintained, and odds are Windows—not MacOS—would have been the ascendant Mach-based OS, because MS would have lost a lot of its ability to fix its problems by losing control of its dev chain. They’d need more radical abstraction than the NT kernel was giving them at the time. Because it was still a branch from OS/2 1.2 which was… special and half-baked. (It’s important to remember that Linux was still considered a toy by most—the “serious” OSS OS was still BSD. And if you had real workloads you ran Solaris, even though you knew Sun was somehow going to doom themselves. The world then looks nothing like the world now.)
This really would have obviated the need for Apple to sell to Sun. Instead, MS would never have made the rescue investment, Sun would continue to skitter off the rails, and Apple would have sold to… I dunno, probably someone weird like Sony. Remember them? Because MS going to Mach would have poisoned the shift from Copeland to NeXTStep… the world barely wanted one Mach-based OS, much less two. One neat side effect, though, is we would have probably seen something a lot like WSL back in 2000 or so. Because the Mach Win build took much more advantage of the OS “personalities” features than MacOS did.
Back then, all of this mattered a lot, because things were far less elegant than they are now. It’s hard to imagine how far we came in the intervening 25 years. So very far.
But in the middle of writing that brief, Judge Jackson shot his stupid mouth off, and I was like, “Welp, nobody’s getting split up now.” And I put it in my archive of good ideas that aren’t gonna happen.
So no, I don’t think there was ever a real scenario where Sun bought Apple.
It suspect it would have been impossible for Sun to sell affordable computers individually or in low quantities because no sales person would have been compensated. Most people wonder why "great technology" dies at the hands of corporate overlords. I don't. I look at where the incentives lie and if they lie on big deals in an industry that's becoming commoditized, that company is likely toast.
Why doesn't the business change to accommodate lower cost, commodity systems or servers? Even in the late 1990's the writing was on the wall. For years as SGI came out with more $40,000+ workstations competing with $10,000 high end x86? Why did Sun push our company in 2000/2001 to buy (relatively mediocre) preforming SPARC $75,000 servers when the industry was clearly moving to commodity x86/64 at $20,000?
The high prices lead to bigger deals and more commission. I was briefly the beneficiary of the Sun startup program and we bought some Sun x86 hardware at reduced rates. Without that program, I would not have been able to afford what was well designed and good quality hardware. I would simply have gone for DELL x86. I was also a Sun reseller for a while, and it was always about the packaged deal.
The sales people have an incredible amount of sway. After all, with no money coming in, you don't last long. (For normal companies - zero revenue unicorns make no sense to me). They will actively undermine any effort to change the situation. They will ridicule and belittle the new technology. But they're sales people and not technologists or developers.
It's like watching the dinosaurs make fun of the asteroid. (What a big, dumb rock!) They would rather have yet another bad sales quarter in an endless string of bad sales quarters than attack their compensation. It's especially fun when it's the end of the quarter and you finally get the call from a sales rep. They're desperate to meet their quota so they'll make a deal on your pathetically small order. They idea that a customer could get on a website and just buy the product at a reasonable cost without having to have a sales meeting to upsell them on another batch services, is incomprehensible to them.
Had Sun bought Apple? It would have been some vaporware product announcements until they realized their sales people weren't interested, sold off any assets of value, and shoved the rest of it in a warehouse as IP. They would go back to trying to hold the line against pesky cheap PCs (which aren't real workstations) and x86 servers (which aren't real servers).