When Oracle bought Sun they were staring right at the future: Sun Cloud. Yet they killed it there and then but if they had've funded it then Oracle would now be the biggest company in the world and Larry the richest.
Scott McNealy was a visionary who saw the future. Sorry Larry.
"I heard (so take it for what it is worth, I can't confirm or deny, only relay) that IBM was interested and Schwartz was actually for selling out to IBM."
Some of us were kidding if we'll need to wear suits once we're acquired by IBM. It was about a month before the deal was called off. Oracle deal was announced a couple of months later.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/18/ibm_buying_sun/
Scott McNealy was a visionary who saw the future.
Quick question OP. Where's Scott and PonyTail now?
Ohhhh, I forgot about those New Director emails.
And they didn't train anyone. Just threw them out into the lab and told them to start right now.
So it took them at least 6-9 months to actually get productive and when they were, they were doing redundant tasks. Then when things went bust, they were the first ones let go.
“ere hiring history majors to work as QA testers ....”
A.k.a. Training and developing people, what a concept....that had little to do with it. I guess you forgot the New Director emails we got regularly, just passing the money out to friends with zero direct reports
Also the EU had its panties in a bunch over MySQL being taken over by the big DB giant.
I heard (so take it for what it is worth, I can't confirm or deny, only relay) that IBM was interested and Schwartz was actually for selling out to IBM. I was told the offer was actually better but It fell through because the other executives and high managers and BOD were going to get the boot without so much as a lead parachute.
Again, this is hearsay so take it for what it is worth.
There were many reasons why Sun Imploded. First, over expansion. They grew in ways that made my head scratch. They were hiring history majors to work as QA testers and were literally converting broom closets into office space. There was no reason for it, there were no more additional products going out the door, the product line did not expand. But we had new employees galore.
Second, when the dot com era went boom, EVERY one, bought Sun servers. 450's, 4000's 5000's 10K's you name it. Couple that to the Y2K threat where companies open up their wallets to upgrade to systems that would handle the needed upgrades, we were pumping them out like fighter planes during WWII. So we were building them round the clock to keep up with the demand. When the dot com era went bust, a whole lot of those server hit the grey market and were being sold for huge discounts over brand new.
Third, Our arrogance regarding x86 and linux. Sun was very late to that party and by the time they took x86 seriously it was too late. We should have been producing both and marketing them for specific markets. And what would have happened if Sun came out with its own real live built from the ground up Linux? Sun was OS, Inc. to many people and Sun Linux would have drawn in many more. I know it would have ruffled a few feathers in Solaris, especially those developing Solaris on x86, but again, you market each product to specific target groups.
Forth and for this, final but by no means last, Sun's ability to overpay for junk companies with junk products and then integrating their junk employees into Sun. Usually at high management and executive levels. The list is endless. Nauticus, Pirus, Centerrun, High Ground, and on and on. They saw a shiney penny and went after it not realizing it wasn't metal but metal plated plastic.
There are other reasons, but these were the biggest.
Scott sold the farm when he brought in pony boy, he should have just burned it all to the ground and collected the insurance money. Never made the leap past Y2K thinking and everyone suffered for his lack of vision and just poor judgement in pinning Sun's future to clueless and arrogant pony boy.
More revisionist history.
I never worked with OCI, though I did request seat time on several occasions, I did like sun cloud and gave it glowing reviews. They were quite proud of their product and rightly so. Shame they never got to put it into production.
it was very stable and you could provision a full on operating environment in a totally self contained and self reliant environment in just a few minutes.
So... better than what we have today...
I was given a very early copy of sun cloud to test and evaluate. By today's standards, it was primitive and didn't have many features, but it was very stable and you could provision a full on operating environment in a totally self contained and self reliant environment in just a few minutes. It was easy to install and set up and full accounting included. I always wondered what happened to those guys. they were really bright and had plenty on the ball. What a waste, though, it had great potential.
Knew some people who were in Sun Cloud. Everyone knew that they would be laid off once the acquisition was announced. So, everyone just waited for their package and spent all their time learning new skills. EU dragged their feet so long that they waited like 9 months just twiddling their thumbs, improving their resume, collecting a paycheck, and waiting for their layoff package.
Turns out, those 9 months is when people realized that the cloud was the future, and nearly all of them got hired within a couple of weeks while still sitting on Oracle layoff money.
Those developers so got the last laugh
It seems laughable now that the Feds were trying to block Sun from being acquired by just about anyone because it would concentrate servers in too few vendors. Sun was losing hundreds of millions and was begging to be acquired by anyone who had the funds and would pass regulatory muster. They would've let themselves been bought by Rent-A-Center if they'd offered.
Scott McNealy had nothing to do with the Sun Cloud.
Sun Cloud was a Jonathan Schwartz project from the very beginning.
Scott McNealy was a visionary who saw the future.
Yeah, I do agree with you 1000%. His visionary leadership and fore sight was instrumental in driving SUN to the ground.
All the sun applications were ignored. The decision at the top was to let individual developers decide on a tool-by-tool basis. When the decision is like that, the decision is always no, since no developer who is working on the same tool at Oracle is going to say. "yeah, I want to give my job to someone from Sun".
Could have been better for Oracle to have someone make the decision at the right level, then assign resources accordingly. Could have been better to use the Sun platform. But that's what acquisitions do. The acquirer has all the power there.