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Comment by farmerstan | Hacker News Reader

I work in enterprise software and around 2000 the combination of Solaris and Oracle database was the most rock solid out of all the various OS/DB combinations. I vaguely remember the threading model was weird and I think limited stack size per thread but overall it was my favorite combo because of how reliable it was.

The speed with which Linux killed Solaris however was astonishing.

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I was at university in the late 90s. In exchange for buying us all (usually cheap) pizza, companies could come in and give an hour long pitch for why we should come work for them after graduation. A few big companies wanted more time so they'd cater higher end pizza or more elaborate catering as a bribe to get students to come to their presentation. Microsoft bough a large amount of Mellow Mushroom (the best pizza in our little college town) and did a two hour presentation on what it is like to work at Microsoft and why we should want to work there. Later in the semester Sun came to campus and catered their two hour presentation with chicken nuggets. But real issue was that the people and videos that were part of Sun's presentation didn't tell us much about Sun or why we should work there. It was a two hour long ranting whinefest about why no one should work at Microsoft. This was on the East Coast so these people were doing a tour of all of the major engineering schools and wasting it on their angst over Microsoft. I was around the time of the JVM lawsuit so I understand why Sun was mad at Microsoft but it seemed to have broken something in their corporate DNA and turned them insane.

Perhaps that was just an isolated incident confined to the university recruiters but Sun at that time seemed overly focused on fighting Microsoft instead of improving their product offerings. Perhaps some of anger ended up turning potential users and employees away from Microsoft but I suspect lots of those ended up going with Linux or some other alternative rather than going with Sun.

You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident!

But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if.

The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft.

It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!

And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!

https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computin...

Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.

To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:

Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T?

A: AT&T.

The SunOS -> Solaris transition was before I joined the industry and in spite of multiple attempts at reading around the topic I've never found an explanation of what happened that actually made sense to me.

> They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft,

Sun completely forgot they were a hardware company. They made great hardware, but while Microsoft made it easy to develop software for Windows, Sun didn't make it easy to do the same for Solaris (maybe out of fear it'd benefit their remaining hardware enemies IBM and HP). They didn't even try very hard to build low-end machines that could do PC tasks at competitive prices.

> Mellow Mushroom (the best pizza in our little college town

Atlanta is little? (Not aware of whether or not Mellow mushroom is in other states or not)

Mellow Mushroom had expanded by then to lots of the southeast, including most of the SEC and ACC college towns. I made a joke to a friend who had moved to Denver that he should start a franchise out there because it fit the culture. Turned out someone has already done it, making a little island of Mellow Mushroom in the Rockies.

I was at a university career fair in, I can't remember the exact year, but I think it was like 2008 or 2009. It may even have been while Sun was in the process of being bought by Oracle? I'm not sure. All I remember was the Sun recruiter handing out OpenSolaris CDs (I think) with a vibe of "well this is all essentially over but it might be fun for you to play with a non-Linux UNIX-like." I'm not sure if "this" was the company or the distro, though, it was a while ago. Mostly I just recall the interesting ambiance of... nostalgia for what could have been, I think...

I was also at university in 98/99 going to job fairs and I was totally sold on the Sun/Solaris/Java future, so I was very excited to see the Sun booth and try to get an interview. But, of all the companies there, they were the least enthusiastic and the least informative. I went to the event sure I wanted to work at Sun and left the event evaluating my other options. Seeing how it turned out in the years that followed, I'm glad I changed my mind!

(Still used a Sun workstation for the next five years at my first job, though.)

IMHO the relative cost of Linux hardware created a brain drain that they didn't see coming and ultimately couldn't resolve. The amount of work a single well-equipped E4500 could do vs a cabinet of x86 gear was remarkable, but that E4500 might run $600K and the x86 gear 0-10% of that.

I'm still staggered by it, and I watched it happen, too.

Several times in my computing career -- say, from 1990 on -- I've seen something start to happen that was clearly going to be huge, only to be told over and over that the obviously-inevitable development was Impossible.

The first example was the ascendancy of the microcomputer. "OH, there will ALWAYS be a space for mainframes! Corporations aren't going to do their accounting on some crappy PC! You're just young and don't see how these things really work."

The second was the way Linux completely destroyed the commercial Unix market (and, with it, the "fancy Unix workstation" market). The power of FOSS is, in my view, very very often overstated by idealists, but it's hard not to see the wholesale corporate/academic/research shift from Solaris, et. al., to Linux on commodity hardware as anything but a HUGE win in terms of computing power.

It’s hard to beat free that runs on cheap everyday hardware.

Sun actually made x86 Solaris 10 free and it ran well on commodity hardware.

When Oracle bought them, they pulled the rug and demanded $1K per CPU per year for the privilege if it was non-Sun/Oracle hardware.

I see this as a huge mistake (quelle surprise, this is Oracle after all).

If they had just copied the RedHat model they might have been onto a winner.

Free unstable, paid stable.

They already have Oracle Linux for that.

I'm drinking coffee out of an Oracle Linux mug from SCaLE 9x, which would have been 2011... note how Oracle Linux has absolutely taken over the world since then :)

Sun tried every combination of free and paid and none of them made inroads in x86.

Yes, that includes the Red Hat model (remember OpenSolaris?)

It lasted for a very short time. OTOH, OpenIndiana is still reasonable if you want a Solaris.

They spent twenty years experimenting with different approaches to marketing Solaris x86.

It was not a lack of persistence

Perhaps free as in money but not in source. All the big boys who deployed it absolutely wanted the source to customize in house. Also too little too late.

It's not only that. I deployed commercial projects when the question "Solaris or Linux" didn't sound ridiculous, and there were times where Solaris had been a reasonable choice. But that was a long time ago. Since then Linux (and the ecosystem) matured a lot, and Solaris didn't have much to counter that, so its relative worth declined rapidly.

> It’s hard to beat free that runs on cheap everyday hardware.

They were a hardware company that designed their own CPUs. If a company could pull an Apple and do an M1, it would be Sun.

Unfortunately, their low-cost machines performed just like PCs and cost the same, without PC software to run on them.

And building x86 boxes that ran with Solaris ensured they'd be no better than PCs, without any compelling software.

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