Sun removing the C compiler from Solaris pretty much made it obligatory for my whole university department to install GCC in the early 90s.
I can't really say that this decission killed sun. I don't knoe how much revenue they got from selling cc, and they were probably toast anyway in the long run. Their main selling point was that they were the same as all the other versions of Unix.
I recall seeing side by side memory quotes from Intel (i.e. an "expensive" vendor in the space, when they were shipping servers) and SGI for the same amount of memory on smallish servers - from memory the SGI was about $18k vs $500 for the intel. Staring at that difference it becomes pretty hard to justify, even if the memory bus was much better. I could buy a couple of new servers for the cost of that memory upgrade.
I suspect Sun's pulling the free c compiler was just one of many "cost cutting" (which end up being revenue cutting) decisions made by a company that saw the writing on the wall but couldn't see how to avoid it.
But that made it worse, they were selling x86 hardware for much higher prices than HP or Dell, without much advantage.
By 2000, the Unix workstation were not much faster outside of 3D hardware and floating points and the discounted price was well above the "equivalent" PC costs.
By 2005, the PCs had exceeded Unix workstations in every way.
The line is kinda blurry in my head but basically a 2004 vintage AMD CPU could do in software (using MesaGL) roughly the same OpenGL performance as a '98 vintage O2 could do with a decent frame buffer. Once the nVidia drivers became ubiquitous, that PC ran circle around all of our SGIs except for the Octane2s (at a 10:1 price differential.)
By 2006, we were down to a single Octane2 with a busted frame buffer being kept to avoid relicensing a numerical package for $$$$.
We had systems developed on Sun, but we couldn't afford to deploy them on Sun hardware. After briefly flirting with the idea that SunOS x86 would be a viable path, we gave up and moved to linux on commodity hardware. It was a new enough thing to do (in the market we were in) that we got a few raised eyebrows, but it turned out to be the right decision.
For integer performance RISC had no benefits left by 1996-1997. 300Mhz P2 (in a Compaq workstation) was at parity with a 250Mhz R10k (SGI O2). The P2 as a fully assembled system was priced less than the R10k CPU alone.
Only the huge amount of cash available to dot-coms propped up Sun then. With all the "you need sun servers for dot-coms" beliefs.
My current employer made the same call (Linux on commodity PC) around the same time for the same reasons. It took ~8-10 years for competitors to stop using the fact it was Linux based for FUD. Now the only issue we get is Windows-only shop (very common in our industry) complaining that we're the only non-Windows system they use.
I wonder if Sun would have been better off if this didn't happen.
That soaked up a huge amount of resources just to catch up to their existing products and, worse, was a message to their existing customers that the old SGI hardware was a dead-end and the new stuff was unproven, which lead most of them to migrate to standard PCs to avoid being locked into the fate of a single vendor.
It's possible that things could have been very different with better senior managers who could limited the number of simultaneous risky transitions or recognized that semiconductor economics would quickly give high-volume “toy” 3D accelerators a huge advantage over niche workstation hardware.
1. Seriously, check out the sales graphs – this is staggering flop given how much hype the entire industry got about Itanium and VLIW being the way, truth and light going forward: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#mediaviewer/File:Itaniu...
OS/2 wasn't really a thing, at least not in Portugal. PC able to run it confortably cost at least 500€ more than the ones that would fly with Windows 3.1.
Sure it wasn't the same thing, but for the majority of the folks it was good enough for what they wanted a computer for.
Actually I would say when Linux came to be a thing, OS/2 was already gone.
I only saw OS/2 once live back in 1994 in the anual computer expo in Lisbon.
GNU/Linux in 1995 still wasn't for the faint of heart. My Slackware 2.0 took quite some effort to install.
1. They barely advertised it.
2. They did not buy good shelf placement in stores. The result was OS/2 was on the bottom shelf in the darkest row in the back of the store, where it would only be found by people who specifically came seeking t.
3. The developer support was terrible. Nothing sums it up better than a report from COMDEX from, if I recall correctly, Jerry Pournelle. He went to the Microsoft booth, where they were promoting the upcoming Windows 95. He asked them what it would take to get started developing for Windows 95. They handed him the SDK right there, no questions asked.
Then he went to the IBM booth, where they actually had an OS/2 display. He asked them what it would take to get started developing for OS/2. They handed him the paperwork to apply for the developer program. He started to fill it out, but it required him to explain his business plan for OS/2 software, and justify why he should be allowed to develop for their platform. He did not complete the form.
4. If you did persevere and become an OS/2 developer and release an application, IBM didn't care. Apple and Microsoft would provide money to promote major applications for their platforms, or applications that highlighted the advantages of their platforms. IBM did very little of this.
[1] Major retail software store back in the days before everything was distributed online, since online back then typically meant dial-up modem.
...does anyone remember the IBM OS/2 Fiesta Bowl?
OS/2 was killed when Microsoft, who schooled IBM and the rest of the world on execution, released Windows. Then MS and IBM "divorced".