https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vDunup8v5M&t=2940s
I'm not totally convinced by the reasoning. Would love to hear some former Sun people give an opinion on his leadership and other perspective.
> 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.
Dropping performance a little bit for Multicore was reasonable for servers, and there were some good ideas there but in practice it was far to extreme to be practical.
StorageTek was quite expensive and sold mostly very large archiving solutions. Not sure that was really the right direction. Such a huge acquisition cost a lot, not just money.
But you are right that this was not totally unreasonable. Still its pretty aggressive move for the company in the position of Sun.
> Sun needed: internal disruption.
After the disaster that was Viking. They might have gone 32bit x86, 64bit Alpha. DEC was desprate for Alpha buyers and would have made them a good deal. But they double down on going all in on SPARC and UltraSPARC confirmed them in this being the right solution.