Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Sun was one of the original Internet tech providers. YOU WILL NEVER ERASE THAT LEGACY.

Legacy's are nice but it doesn't bring home the bacon. Just ask DEC, Burroughs, Data General, Prime, Ardent, Stellar, ComputerVision, KayPro, And so on...

Sun did do great things and I was a part of many of them and dam proud I was (I am also ex-DEC), but that was then. This is now and I had a front row seat while the whole thing fell apart. That's part of the legacy, too.

I still see iPlanet, com.Sun.com and other artifacts in log files, config files and error strings.

Sun was one of the original Internet tech providers. YOU WILL NEVER ERASE THAT LEGACY.

DUKE will be following you for the rest of your days.

So go ahead and mock all you want, if it makes you feel better 😚

I honestly don't know whether this would be considered a blunder or not, but what about the acquisition of iplanet? That acquisition seemed convoluted and I can't remember the iplanet guys selling much of anything. They sure had a lot of products though. Appservers, some sort of eBay like market/trading platform, etc.

The Newark campus, especially NWK13. Sun spent millions to build the NWK campus just over the bridge. NWK13 was a GIGANTIC manufacturing facility I mean it reminded me of an aircraft hangar. No sooner did it open and get up to production speed, they closed it. Then the entire campus was empty. I spent a week there for a series of meetings in 2005 and the place was deserted. I mean mining ghost town deserted.

Back during the dot com bo-m, I remember Wall St stated flatly that in order for Sun's stock to remain in a growth position. Basically they were saying that unless Sun expanded they would sell off. McNealy Obeyed their directives and we expanded. ALOT. We went on a building and hiring spree that was out of control. We turned broom closets into offices and stiffed 3 into doubles and 2 into singles. We hired art history majors to do QA testing. We also expanded production to meet the demand. I remember looking at this and thinking that this was insane. We weren't expanding product lines or introducing new products, but we expanding far beyond what was needed. Then the dot bo-b bust came. the market was flooded with lightly used grey market systems, sales were drastically cut and we were left with having to cut people and real estate. In a declining market. When you over extend, you permanently damage your corporate body. Ask Prime. DEC, and dozens of other companies . That was the beginning of the long slow end.

That was the beginning of the end.

OMG the Schwartz open source pony tail video! Too funny!

Hiring pony tail in the first place. Sun needed pragmatism, not unicorn farts.

Then they went and scrapped the cloud strat. I never understood the reason why

That was another disastrous blunder. Why? Simple, at the time it was not very practical or automated. But instead of using the Mind set that Honda or Toyota uses to build cars ( analysis, long term investment, continuous improvement), they got impatient, refused to look and think long term and lost interest. Nope, it doesn't work, let's close it up and look for another shiny penny. This is a sore spot with me because I worked for a company in the 90's that was exploring and developing "distributed computing" and I saw the potential what N1 could have been.

Sun had henhouses of geese that laid golden eggs. They didn't ki-l then, they let them starve to death. And no one was ever held accountable.

Yea it still chafes me.

Yeah, but but but, SOLARIS ZONES!!!!

Zones were pretty great, True virtualization (as opposed to OVM and others which is really emulation) that was very lightweight and fast. ZFS was great too. The problems started when they decided to pack features very few people would ever use into the Solaris core making it the OS version of Fat Albert. If they were smart (and by that time they most certainly were NOT) they should have made Solaris much more modular and allowed the user to add the modules they needed and strip out the ones they did not.

It started with Solaris 10 and just got worse.

...and Terraspring around the same time (?)

Beat me with a wet noodle, Terraspring was a beaut. Was supposed to automate deployments (like chef does now)

OMG the Schwartz open source pony tail video! Too funny!

I actually knew a sun vp personally. He was clueless but made a lot of money. He thought his job was a big joke. How can you get away with doing so little and get paid so much!

I do remember reading a post-mortem on Sun that said the Sun executive team was "like a whale determined to beach itself". That still makes me laugh.

• Bungled the StorageTek acquisition. STK tape libraries were a cash cow with 50% market share. Sun proceeded to lose half of that within a couple of years.

• Failed to capitalize on the ZFS file system when it was hot new technology.

• If open sourcing software was ever a good idea, Sun waited until way too late to do it, and then did it stupidly. E.g., by the time they open-sourced Solaris not that many people cared about it anymore.

Turning Solaris into a bloating pig that does everything (just much more slowly)

Yeah, but but but, SOLARIS ZONES!!!!

Would the hiring of J Schwartz be considered a "strategic blunder"? LOL
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5r3JSciJf5M

The purchase of Pirus

...and Terraspring around the same time (?) Then they went and scrapped the cloud strat. I never understood the reason why - vague memory that customer datacenters maybe did not have hardware that supported network virtualization or ... ??

OH yea, Forgot some more ( I knew I would)
Purchasing Kobalt
Purchasing Nauticus (The Nauticus switch had a hardware defect that could not be corrected and had people done their due dilligence they would have found it and either not purchased that brick or purchased it for pennies on the dollar)
Outsourcing IT networking and the datacenters to AT&T (It cost MORE in the long run that keeping it in house)

The purchase of Pirus
The purchase of Highground
The Purchase of Centerrun
The Purchase of Encore
The Purchase of Thinking Machines (part I)
The Purchase of Thinking Machines (part II)
The Inability/unwillingness to Compete with Lenova, Acer and Dell in the virtual terminal space with Sunray
Turning Solaris into a bloating pig that does everything (just much more slowly)
Sun Linux or Lack thereof

Those are the ones I can think of today.

Here is a biggie

When Andy B returned to work on the AMD system rollout the execs did not allow the systems to be scaled beyond 8 CPUs because they did not want to cannibalize SPARC servers. Since the AMD arch supported linear scalability up to something like 64 procs (both in terms of performance and system cost - AMD was CC-NUMA for the geeks out there) it would have been a market game changer
eg,

• like same compute power as an E10K for a quarter of the cost game changer
• like scale your inexpensive 2xCPU system to E10K power without changing the chassis game changer

Execs figured if they just stuck to their knitting everything would be cool. McSquealy was ousted as CEO about 1 year later.