Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

@bj
I worked at Sun as a sales engineer up until about 2003. Hard to believe the gaslighting and/or romanticizing of Sun, Sunray included. FWIW, I detested the Sunray.

There were so many mediocre aspects to Sun technology, hardware and software both and yet long-term Sun acolytes truly believed they were way ahead on everything. I rarely met any employee there who knew much about hardware or software.

Some examples that I have worked hard to forget - so certain details my not be 100% correct:

• The deskside and larger servers that (aside from the E10K) sold like hotcakes in the late 90s through the doc-com bust did not were not designed to use ECC memory and would crash whenever there was a parity error..

• The inability of Solaris (felt like an eternity) to support both 32 and 64 bit libs, this delayed the release of a 64 bit OS for years.

• Speaking of Solaris - who designed the patch and patch dependency system. Other versions of Unix at the time had that all automated. With Sun any patching effort started with a major research project.

• Andy Bechtolsheim came back to Sun in the early 2000s when x86 and horizontal scalability was starting to eat Sun's lunch. Through a partnership w/ AMD he designed a CC-NUMA server (high-speak memory switch supported up to 16 or 64 CPUs - I can't remember now). It was the perfect play to go against Microsoft and all the competing x86 vendors. However, McSquealy, et. al. told Andy they could not offer a server that would expand outside a single chassis, thus squandering the CC-NUMA advantage offered by the AMD architecture. The execs apparently felt the design would cannibalize the high-margin deskside and larger SPARC servers.

SOOOOOooooooooo many bad memories of such an overrated company. SOOOOoooo many arrogant employees and Peter Principle managers. Sun really deserved the slow, painful end that it is still experiencing today.

Other than the core DB team, Oracle were not much of experts in hardware, OS, or infrastructure. Oracle has always been a marketing and legal corporation. After the merger, key people from Sun preferred to leave and not work for LE. Some of Sun's products were in competition with Oracle's IP. Good and average tech got canned, and their value was never understood by Oracle - they didn't care while on a high. It's like how Clay doesn't understand any of Oracle's products and doesn't care. Same problems, different jokers.

Sun was a great and generous company. Most of the products were sold below cost ;0);0);0);0);0)

Sun Microsystems was a great company in 2000, and Sunray was a great product, then. The company lost its way and couldn't make the right bets - like many other gold companies like Digital DEC, Cray, SGI. Deal with it instead of romanticising a technology so ridiculously expensive and yet causing the company to lose money. If SUN had doers instead of thinkers performing intellectual mast*bation even after 25 years, it might have survived. Get a life, get a job.

O is only interested in Maximizing Overall Profitability. No B.S. 0);0);0);0);0);0)

I won't sing the praises of Windows, but Sunrays were aweful too. RIP

@OP +100.

Oracle could and should have become #1 in cloud with the infusion of Sun technology.

Oracle management just didn't appreciate their luck in acquiring the best technology company on the planet.

@OP got that right. They don’t.