> I think he didn't realize how externally this would look for the viability of Solaris on x86.
I'd love to see that. Yeah, it didn't go well. It was a disaster.
> > - Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.
> Can you give some context. I am interested in Sun history and I don't know that one.
In 2004 Sun closed Sun PS. Well, it... didn't go away completely in that what was left became Sun Client Solutions, but the lay-offs IIRC hurt that unit a great deal.
> (Edit: I see you mean Sparc T1, but those chips were trash, they were not to late. They were good marketing above good product)
Yeah, and it was too late to edit my comment. My bad. But yes. The SPARC folks had some great ideas in the T line, but it was a) way too late, b) didn't have access to latest node size, so it wasn't going to be great-performing, c) performance sucked.
> Also StorageTek.
Eh, not sure about that. The acquisitions of StorageTek and Procom were the only ones I can think of where Sun actually managed to capitalize on what it acquired. The Procom side contributed a Microsoft RPC stack and an SMB/CIFS stack, which was in fact integrated into Solaris. The StorageTek side became the Sun storage appliance.
In 2009 Sun's greatest hope was that its systems work on the storage appliance was going to succeed and save it. That stack was far far better than NetApp's and anyone else's. Of course, that didn't materialize in time, and we know the rest of the story.
With all these mistakes there's enough there to think about many possible alternative paths Sun could have taken, but... there's no point, it's done. I don't recommend dwelling upon much unless you're building a business school case study, and for that I think Sun is an excellent case candidate, especially given that you can compare Sun to Apple and others, so you can see what could have been.
My diagnostic is that McNealy checked out with the 2001 crisis, Schwartz was just a really, really bad steward, and no one wanted to take the hatchet to the vendor lock-in products that were holding Sun back. In 2002 the right thing to have done was to announce less investment in SPARC and start winding it down -- that would have freed many billions for other things later in the 00s, and it would have saved Sun PS. But perhaps in 2002 Sun didn't have the systems expertise needed for the transformation it needed to undertake.
Meanwhile Apple was never wedded to an ISA for long, and even now that they make their own CPUs they could easily switch if they had to. I say 'easily', but it's monstrously expensive, yet for Apple it's totally doable. Steve Jobs wasn't afraid of disrupting Apple itself. That's what Sun needed: internal disruption.