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Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

This brings back many bad memories of Sun changing its ticker symbol from the venerable "SUNW" to "JAVA" -- may BBRY not share the same fate!

That said, let me take this moment to restate a prediction I have made a few times over the last two years: ORCL will, in the end, buy BBRY. After every customer that has a choice leaves, BBRY will be left with only those customers who can't actually leave. ORCL feasts on such wounded animals, and like a marine apex predator, can sense them from an ocean away...

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In fairness to Sun, in the last 5-10 years of its existence, it really was The Java Company; a huge portion of all its sales went to companies deploying and scaling enterprise Java web applications.

Moreover, by the end of the '90s, Sun's original raison d'être --- Unix workstations --- was gone and buried.

Yes, workstations were gone -- and they had been replaced by server revenue. Contrary to your assertion, server revenue (and associated service revenue) was the lion's share of Sun's revenue; if you add up all Java revenue (primarily Java ME) and subtract all Java NRE, Java was -- pathetically -- net neutral to Sun. So to those of us who actually brought in revenue instead of dining out on it, the ticker change was the embodiment of the persistent delusion that we were something other than a computing systems company...

My point was that the reason people bought Sun servers was to run enterprise Java apps.

(In case this makes it clearer: what percentage of large Sun server customers used the majority of those servers to run some kind of Java container server? Do you think maybe over 75%? From working with F-500 companies as a consultant in the mid-00's, my observation is closer to 100%; if you were a bank with Sun servers, the reason you had them was that Sun provided the can't-get-fired-for-choosing platform for J2EE.)

I think thats just an observational bias of companies that went the consultant route. Java was the hot new technology that consultants could bill lots of hours for, so you started to see it everywhere with weak internal IT/systems groups.

Working in the manufacturing/CAD industry at the time, I ran a Sun and SGI shop. Business applications that ran only on Solaris were a much larger demand generator for Sun hardware than some new fancy runtime that at the time could be confused for a passing fad.

We also liked Sun hardware for internal apps because they could literally run for 10+ years in a room filled with a constant mist of machine oil and coolant.

I'm not a Java consultant. The CAD Sun buyers were workstation customers, weren't they?

I do not think Java web applications were a smaller demand generator for Sun than Motif applications were.

Agreed. Sun bought StoageTek somewhere in there. Which was fun for me as both companies were resellers for my former employer. Sun was still selling a decent amount of server gear, they just sort of fell out of the consumer space.

> Moreover, by the end of the '90s, Sun's original raison d'être --- Unix workstations --- was gone and buried.

Never thought about this in this way. It is kind of sad that Sun suffered directly from Linux success.

Unix workstations were largely slaughtered by Windows NT (and faster/cheaper PC hardware). Linux wasn't helping, but it didn't have the professional CAD etc. software at the time.

Very true regarding workstations.

Although when the bottom dropped out of Sun workstation market, resellers started dumping stock and end users started stock piling.

I was slap bang in the middle making cash. I made enough to buy a new Land Rover Defender in a week :)

Gone are those days :(

Huh, first thing I thought of when seeing "BBRY" was Burberry (which is BRBY on the London Stock Exchange).

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