21/01/2010 15:12 (10:09 minutes ago)
The FINANCIAL -- The European Commission has approved under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of US hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems Inc. by Oracle Corporation, a US enterprise software company.
It's interesting to compare this to the Apple acquisition of NeXT, wherein the NeXT engineers wore t-shirts depicting the NeXT cube eating the Apple logo.
I got my start with Unix on a SPARCstation while interning at British Telecom. I used it to build a website (using C++ and Oracle for the backend - must have been in 1993 or 1994, when the web was still fairly uncommon outside of big companies and academia).
I clearly remember coming home from work and raving to axod about how rad Sun was because they did some fairly high-level graphics operations in hardware (at the time he was doing a lot of VGA programming in x86 assembler, so I think this impressed him).
They aimed for the high-end server market. Sun has nothing in the price-range of a low-end Dell. It's not that it's impossible to do - I bet they could. They just never tried because building high-end stuff is way cooler.
Being Windows-proof didn't help either. It is a virtue on my book, but not many people agree with me.
See my comment about how Sun made it impossible for a start up to buy a moderate quantity of these servers. People were willing to buy Sun quality but ended up buying Dell because Dell wanted to do business with them, which then lost them the follow on sales for those who made it big.
Low-end servers were coming and anybody could see it back in the mid-90s. Sun instead refused to see it. They focused on the very profitable - for a time - high-end stuff and neglected the other end of the spectrum. After it was brutally obvious this strategy ("stragedy"?) wouldn't work, they decided to make some of the coolest and more expensive x86 boxes money could buy. They made suicidal mistake after
suicidal mistake.
Startups could have bought them. It was very hard to buy Sun hardware in the quantities between what you could put on a credit card and the equivalent of a mainframe installation. A lot of people who wanted to buy Sun ended up buying Dell servers and that deprived Sun of the sales they would have made for the companies that were big hits.
They had kept their hardware configurations consistent. A number of big customers dropped them because they kept changing things like the management interface, Ethernet chip (Intel to nVidia chipset), etc. Sometimes their SATA device driver support was less than stellar (I saw this as someone who wanted to run Solaris in the 2007-8 period on a Tyan motherboard that Sun OEMed) and I have to wonder about other device drivers (Sun wasn't all that good at fixing serious bugs).
Unconnected, but devastating: they burned a tremendous amount of credibility in enterprise server space when they had a flaky cache problem and required their customers to sign an NDA before they would get service ... and then tended to blame the customer for server room environment problems. A different attitude was needed if they wanted sustained success in this place, which for them developed very quickly after they bought that SMP Sparc system from SGI.
One bottom line is just too many failures to execute.
If you mean the culture that mismanaged Sun into oblivion, yes, hopefully, it's dead. I trust Larry Ellison has, at least, the gift of identifying what's wrong.
Sun is far more interesting than the JAVA ticker may betray. They have an impressive lineup of servers, processors, compilers and OSs, all of them being able to do stuff most competitors cannot even approach.
It's however, a dysfunctional and disjointed collection of very cool technologies that add little or no value to the Sun brand because almost nobody a) knows Sun still exists and b) knows the technologies exist.
Now we can bitch about what they haven't done, and what hit products they didn't launch and how an incredibly cool company ended up being part of the ultimate uncool one.
We already have that though... Now Oracle even has two: Sun's and BEA's. The only thing that was keeping it together was the JCP and the test suite. I'm not sure what is going to come out of that. Whatever it is, I wouldn't put any money on the process getting any better or faster.
Perhaps we'll start to see more things like Dalvik. It's like Java the language, but not Java(tm).
I think we've seen enough Oracle acquisitions to have a pretty good idea what will happen next. Oracle will absorb the good parts, the rest will be tossed into the bay.
Denial is a wonderful thing. People said that "Sun was setting" for about a decade. The warnings were ignored and now the entity known as Sun is gone. The world would have been a better place if it survived. RIP.
