Sun Microsystems Decline
This cluster focuses on the decline and eventual acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, with discussions attributing it to competition from commodity x86 hardware and Linux, failure to adapt to open source trends, and strategic missteps around SPARC and Solaris.
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Hint: The company that aquired Sun is Oracle. They have a proven track record for monetizing stuff.
Linux didn't kill Solaris alone. Sun Microsystems started doing that (as much as we loved Sun), and then Oracle put the lid on the coffin.
Last encounter with Sun's commercial version of Solaris: 1995 - running on SPARCstation
My experience with Sun products was before and after Oracle acquisition extremely bad. Particularly the last times when they started supporting intel and went open source.
Sun was destroyed by commodity Intel hardware on one side and free open source software (Apache/Linux/GCC, etc) on the other. In the very early 90s Sun workstations and servers could do things x86 boxes couldn’t do. Once that changed they were doomed.
>Ironically, Sun might have not had to sell themselves to Oracle, and the world's server's might be running on SPARC chips that are immune to these issues.Solaris, with the exceptions of a few bright stars like DTrace and ZFS, always seemed like a POS to me, compared to linux. Especially as a work-station. Sun went full retard with Java everywhere right before they went under and I have a feeling the Solaris Desktop experience, and by extension the UNIX desktop experience, would
As much as I loved Sun workstations and Solaris, I'm pretty sure Sun went under all by itself.
"* they sold SUN/Solaris servers, until the market started preferring cheap x86 stations with Linux installed"They were late to the cheap-desktop-running-linux party, but they could, arguably, build inexpensive desktops had they given up the idea of building desktops as if they were tanks. I bet they could build SPARC servers at Dell prices, if they wanted to have Dell quality."* they had a great start with Java applets but they weren't a company of creatives, like Macromedia/Adobe, and so
Sun commoditized hardware and operating systems with "write once run anywhere". Then they commoditized software with free stuff, such as OpenOffice, VirtualBox, etc. Then the music stopped and, having no consulting operation to speak of, they had nowhere to sit.
It could have been worse... think of when Sun was bought by Oracle.