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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> Sun Microsystems had immense revenue and clout in the server and enterprise space because of the dotcom boom, so much so that their advertising declared "We're the dot in dotcom."

Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware.

> With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed.

Sun was a hardware company that did everything it could to commoditize software. That strategy works extremely well for hardware companies -- Intel successfully did the same thing for many years -- as long as their hardware is competitive.

They were perfectly content to sell SPARC hardware with Linux on it. But to do that they need to sell enough of it to keep up the R&D, i.e. they needed to ship desktop chips in similar quantities to Intel instead of only servers.

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Original Sun hardware was rugged, operating mounted in truck beds running across corrugated roads rugged, optional full Faraday shielding for box, cables, and monitors tough. Really positive "never going to let you go" slotting of expansion cards into motherboard that resisted vibration issues. Fans that could go in a building HVAC.

That came at a cost and the market size of people that really really wanted / needed that field toughness was considerably smaller than the general office usage market.

Because that's the market you can win when you're locked out of the mass market. But it's also not sustainable because then the mass market product will move up (Xeons based on x86) and you still can't move down with Microsoft blocking you.

Whereas if not for that, you could do both. Design a solid chip and then put dozens of them in a big iron cabinet for big money but also offer desktops with just one of them for prices that compete with Dell. Except that Dell's customers expect to open their existing Office documents and run their Windows API proprietary software and then won't buy from you.

> "Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware."

Huh? Sun Microsystems pretty much owned the workstation market by the mid to late 1990s, having beat out HP, DEC, IBM, etc. It was their game to lose, which they did. And I can't think of anything Sun ever offered in the desktop market in their heyday that was credible; their lunchbox SparcStations cost too much and delivered too little.

The main buoyancy behind Microsoft's push into the workstation market around Y2K is that Windows 2000 was much cheaper and ran on also much cheaper Intel processors. Compared to the ridiculous enterprise pricing from Sun and the other UNIX OEMs, the TCO made them very compelling.

> And I can't think of anything Sun ever offered in the desktop market in their heyday that was credible; their lunchbox SparcStations cost too much and delivered too little.

When they were selling Unix and the alternative was DOS, Unix was better. Except that Microsoft did everything they could to keep everything tied to their own OS.

> Compared to the ridiculous enterprise pricing from Sun and the other UNIX OEMs, the TCO made them very compelling.

Sun was already on the decline by the time Windows 2000 was released. How many people were playing PC games on Sun hardware in the 1990s?

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