Ask HN: What caused the downfall of Sun Microsystem? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What caused the downfall of Sun Microsystem?

13 pointsdidip13 comments

They seemed unstoppable in the 90s and the Internet era should have led them to greatness.

What happened? Why can’t they pivot to save themselves? Even Apple managed to survive from bankruptcy.

I didn't work at Sun, and I have no inside knowledge. But I lived through it;

1) Sun made expensive gear. Nice stuff to be sure, but too expensive for home use. Target market was therefore "business".

2) Intel improved quickly. So every couple years Intel machines basically doubled in performance. When your hook is "fastest" you need to iterate very fast to stay ahead.

3) every time Intel got faster, some part of the market got lost. Which means convincing existing customers their hardware is obsolete and time to buy again. Folk are being sold really expensive gear and then told its obsolete barely a few years later.

4) dot com bust floods the market with cheap everything, including cheap Sun hardware.

5) network effects (software availability, using the same computer at work, at home, at school, experience at prior wotkplaces) all work against Sun. (In another thread I see an ex-Sun person referring to windoze- if all else fails, try shaming the client into making "better choices".)

Java (write once, run anywhere) was a play to improve software availability, but folks selling Java software weren't really interested in supporting niche platforms (so yeah, it probably runs on Sun, but we don't have one so we don't support that). Plus Java became "write once, debug everywhere".

In short Sun lost because Wintel was everywhere, and Sun was too expensive, and ultimately had no edge. In a market with network effects there are winners and everyone else fails.

Linux was a huge factor in Sun's downfall. Instead of expensive proprietary Solaris on expensive proprietary SPARC hardware, there was this free thing that worked well enough on x86.

A few things I remember.

Early 90's a few old friends that worked as security guards all bought 486 clones so they could play DOOM.

Probably about the same time Autocad and Schematic Capture running on a PC was fast enough.

Couple of years later friend that worked for big corp got a sun work station as his work computer. Quickly noticed his officemates PC took 1/3 the time to compile.

Electronic suppliers chasing high PC volumes didn't give an rats ass about companies like Sun's rounding error volumes.

I remember Unix boxes as being clunky. To boot insert the boot floppy. Power failed, your file system is toast.

I feel like this all point to them failing to innovate out of their core competency and create cash cow products.

Joel Spolsky touched on Sun in Strategy Letter V (2002): https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

> Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements. [...]

> Headline: Sun Develops Java; New “Bytecode” System Means Write Once, Run Anywhere. [...]

> Sun’s enthusiasm for WORA [write once run anywhere] is, um, strange, because Sun is a hardware company. Making hardware a commodity is the last thing they want to do.

It was a great brand when UNIX systems were the legitimate choice for enterprises--before the cloud. But like DEC--another great brand--they could not adapt their systems products in response to the competition.

Here is a prior conversation on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2286466

For whatever it's worth (perhaps not much!), I more or less stand by my answer from 2011[0]: Sun lost track of the fact that it was (or should have been) a systems company. As for Apple: it came within a hair's width of perishing in the Amelio era -- and surely would have capsized had they not purchased NeXT; it's harder to endure that it might look!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033

> 2) Inability to capitalize on their inventions. IBM used Java as a common language across all of their enterprise platforms, they sold Websphere as a common application platform. NetApp was able to build a large business off NFS.

Personally I'm grateful to Sun for developing useful things like Java and NFS for the rest of the industry. IBM and NetApp certainly are as well.

Innovator's dilemma perhaps. It's certainly hard for a large company to pivot to new businesses. Apple remarkably entered the music player, tablet, smartphone, and smart watch businesses, as well as new services businesses. Now the Mac is almost an afterthought compared to the iPhone. Apple even seems to sell more iPads than Macs (though Mac revenue is slightly higher?) And they weren't afraid to let the iPhone kill off the iPod (though I still miss the iPod touch, basically a wi-fi only iPhone.)

The dot com bust wiped out their hardware sales as you could pick up almost new top of the range Sun hardware at auction. They never really recovered from that, despite a couple of good quarters in the mid 00s.

I think Sun tried to pivot but they couldn't put together a coherent strategy together. Some of their acquisitions were all over the place. Scott McNealy probably stuck around longer than he should have.

Contrast with Apple who had a fairly clear strategy of doubling down on the Mac and then building synergy with other products (like the iPod) to grow.

Cheap Linux workstations.

It wasn't just the obvious price advantage, but despite Solaris' best efforts, Linux was still superior, because people could learn it at home.

And some time after Windows 98, Intel + Windows became a viable platform for running AutoCAD, CATIA and similar engineering software. Perhaps not perfect, but for many companies it was good enough.

They got acquired by Oracle for $7.4B

Oracle continues to sell Sun SPARC based hardware as the best platform for Oracle database. Also Oracle wanted to own Java.

Sun sold expensive hardware and low cost systems flooded the market with decent performance, so the sell was to businesses who liked the reliability and support.

First big deal was the megapixel workstation, meeting a science and engineering need. Motorola chips gave way to RISC, (SPARC) which worked well.

Next big deal was the dot-com boom, and timing was perfect for expensive, powerful and reliable computers. Larger systems and networks of Suns powered many dot-coms, and even Pixar. [0]

100 E-4000 servers.

But dot com faded (crashed) and compute farms were built on cheap redundant hardware.

I was systems engineer in education sales, and it got tough. After I left, Sun eventually sold to Oracle.

Sun bought Cobalt for the Qube, which was pretty cool for education but schools below college level ran on “educational” windoze apps, like the infamous “Reader Rabbit”, so we ended up with windoze servers running them and accessing them via Citrix to Sunrays, one per teacher. I’d have much preferred Linux apps ported to Solaris, the likes of the very amazing GCompris set of educational apps.

There’s a TLDR kind of summary at Slashgear. [1]

Sun pioneered lots of great technology, or advanced it. Some include Java, ZFS, and virtualization (Solaris Zones and E-10000 ) and more.

I supported university computing before joining Sun, and it was a good fit. Sun had donated a raft of workstations. And universities made good use of the gear, such as NOW [2], the network of workstations. Arguably the progenitor of Google and Facebook style compute farms.

[0]: https://www.hpcwire.com/1998/12/18/pixar-used-sun-systems-po...

[1]: https://www.slashgear.com/1352662/forgotten-computer-compani...

[2]: http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/

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