If I remember this correctly, the move was largely an attempt to make the OS irrelevant by moving applications to the Web. Long term, this more or less worked, but the revolution didn't come quickly enough to save Sun or Netscape.
But I think what they were trying to say was "in the future, the data you use will be spread out all over the network," which, yes, was an advanced concept in 1995. And I hope it was a business strategy to try to sidestep MSFT's desktop dominance (otherwise they were doing it by accident.) I think Sun did a great job of helping create a world where your desktop OS didn't matter that much (I use FreeBSD, Linux, Win10 and occasionally macOS on a daily basis.) But it seems to me Sun really missed the mobile revolution. In the late 2000s, we had a Sun guy come and try to pitch the latest SPARC CPUs for mobile designs. IIRC, they had great per/cycle power numbers, but were just CPUs (not SoCs) and it was hard to throttle them down to the point where you could get decent battery performance. Alas, so much great technology, now wasted.
DonHopkins on April 15, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use
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://web.archive.org/web/20200814053447/https://www.itbus...
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.
I would add things are rarely only one thing. Did Sun cherish Solaris and Oak/Java developers? Absolutely. Did they cherish all of them equally? Absolutely not. Did they also see them as disposable pawns in a war against MSFT? Not as much at the beginning, but pretty much exclusively towards the end.
You still can't pay me enough to use Eclipse. Well, that's not completely true. I got paid to use Eclipse a couple jobs ago. I wasn't happy about it, but I was too lazy to write something better.
And there's probably another discussion in here about how the market changes and if you don't change with the market you turn into IBM or CA. (Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.) IBM came late to the PC party and had to sell it's soul (use an open architecture) in order to not be steam-rollered by Apple (and Commodore and Atari of all people.) MSFT famously came late to the intarwebz and it took Bill Gates to personally beat up some vice presidents to get them to focus on it. I think we just violently agreed that Sun was too focused on defending their web dominance from MSFT that they sort of ignored Leenucks for too long (and as best I can tell just ignored mobile.) Imagine what the landscape would look like if Sun added third-party intel servers as first class supported systems for OpenSolaris (and maybe started OpenSolaris a little earlier.) That was probably too much for Sun management to put their brainstems around at the time.
Agreed, the tools you learned in school influenced what you use in your job (when you had a chance to influence that), and that was understood by marketers since before Linux. I even know one top CS department that was threatened by a major software company of no internships and other sanctions, if they moved to Linux rather than teach classes with that company's software, and the company seemed to follow through on the threat when the department did Linux anyway. (Nowadays, CS departments are run more like vocational schools, or hoping students do startups, and are generally teaching whatever tools they think industry is using at the moment, rather than leading.)
Related: Apple aggressively getting the Apple II series into schools, influencing what's bought in affluent homes, even before the students are old enough to get jobs.
If Solaris was open sourced say, five years earlier, it would probably have been a major player in the OS space today. (we'll never know, of course, history took a different turn).
> But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world
IIRC i read/heard somewhere that there were also talks for Google to use sun hardware or the solaris OS for their internal infra. I don't remember the source for that though :(