Oracle 终于干掉了 Sun！
Sun Oracle

> 
> **随着 Solaris 团队的彻底完蛋，看起来 Sun 微系统公司最终连块骨头都没剩下。**
> 
> 
> 


![](/data/attachment/album/201709/05/161941p7lmxfechzfiowcp.jpg)


来自前 Sun 社区的消息表明，[一月份的传闻](http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/20/oracle-lays-off-450-employees/)（Oracle 裁员 450 人）成为了现实，上周五，[Oracle 裁掉了 Solaris 和 SPARC 团队的核心员工](https://twitter.com/drewfisher314/status/903804762373537793)，选择这个时候（<ruby> 美国劳动节 <rp>  （ </rp> <rt>  Labor Day </rt> <rp>  ） </rp></ruby>前的周末）或许是希望这个消息被大众所忽略。


![](/data/attachment/album/201709/04/231420q0z6clxbv4l6t4tt.jpg)


可以肯定，这意味着对于这些产品只会剩下骨架级的维护，特别是， [Solaris 12 也取消了](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confirms-demise-of-solaris-12-effort/)。这是一个典型的 Oracle 式的“<ruby> 无声结局 <rp>  （ </rp> <rt>  silent EOL </rt> <rp>  ） </rp></ruby>”，无论他们怎么声称保证履行对富士通和其它客户的合同条款。


随着该硬件的淘汰，我估计这是最后一个被 Oracle 收购处置的 Sun 资产了。在收购 Sun 微系统公司之后，[Oracle 的埃里森对 Sun 的管理毫不留情](http://www.businessinsider.com/wow-larry-ellison-just-tore-ex-sun-ceo-jonathan-schwartz-a-new-one-2010-5?IR=T)，而且最大化地利用其手中的机会。那么，Sun 的资产都在 Oracle 手里都有什么遭遇呢？我并不是很关注 Oracle 的业务，但是可以从下列报告中一窥：


* Java 被称之为“皇冠上的宝石”，但是其买下 Java SE 的[真实原因](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/18/oracle-google-court-smartphone)其实是——试图起诉 Google 赔偿 80 亿美金，而且还两次败诉。
* 埃里森说 [Java 是中间件成功的关键](https://betanews.com/2009/04/20/industry-in-a-box-sun-acquisition-will-lead-to-oracle-java/)，但是现在 Java EE 正准备[交给一个开源基金会](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/java-ee-moving-open-source-foundation)。
* Oracle 批评 Sun 没能从 Java 上挣到钱（忽略了 1996 - 2000 年 Java 使硬件市场获利的事实）并提出了一个根本不会产生收入的[免费模型](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/06/oracle_dueling_jvms/)。
* 他们 [拥抱了 NetBeans](https://www.infoworld.com/article/2627862/application-development/oracle-hails-java-but-kills-sun-cloud.html)，而现在它被捐献给了 Apache 基金会。
* 对 [MySQL 安全修复](http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2012/07/20/security-fixes-in-mysql-critical-patch-updates)的官僚主义导致一部分社区成员转而和 MySQL 创始人 Monty 创建了 MariaDB 分支，而新分支已经足以支撑起[一家公司](http://mariadb.com/)。
* 埃里森说要[重建 Sun 的硬件业务](https://web.archive.org/web/20100516032914/http://abcnews.go.com:80/Business/wireStory?id=10630034)，但是[其负责人已经在一个月前离职了](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/02/oracle_john_fowler_bails/)，而剩下的员工也属于裁员的一部分。
* 尽管 Sun 的前老板 [McNealy 明白 Solaris 只有开源才能赢得市场](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open_source/?page=3)，Oracle 表示“你说的没错”，然后把 Solaris [弄死了](http://www.osnews.com/story/23683/Oracle_Kills_OpenSolaris_Moves_Development_Behind_Closed_Doors)。其结果就是，上周末的裁员——而这在今年一月份就已经有了传闻。
* [Hudson 处理失当](https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/01/hudson-jenkins2)，意味着其 CI 业务只能跟在 CloudBees 从 Hubson 分支而来的 Jenkins 后面。
* Oracle 放弃了 Sun 的身份管理项目，而现在 Forgerock 用它撑起了一个价值五亿美金的业务，为那些 Oracle 所不在意的客户服务。
* Oracle 决定 [取消 Sun Cloud](https://www.infoworld.com/article/2627862/application-development/oracle-hails-java-but-kills-sun-cloud.html) ，并拆除了 Solaris 中的云服务功能，然后现在是云服务的天下了。
* Oracle 重命名了 StarOffice，然后[宣布了一个云端版本](https://web.archive.org/web/20101217212955/http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/195766)，但是没卵用。感觉该项目将走向末日，遭受到了严厉对待的社区决定另起锅灶去做 LibreOffice。
* 只有 VirtualBox 看起来还好。


也许这并不是 Sun 失败的真正原因——[在开源 Solaris 上花了太长时间](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open_source/?page=3)，并在 2000 - 2002 年间试图用以市场为主导的方式来替代 Sun 一贯的工程为主导的方式——埃里森指责那些承担力挽狂澜责任的、硕果仅存的领袖们 McNealy、Zander、Tolliver 和他们的团队。埃里森从来没有理解过 Schwartz 所采取的开创性做法，而是在[博客中嘲讽](https://web.archive.org/web/20100516032944/http://abcnews.go.com:80/Business/wirestory?id=10630034&page=2)和[取消所有正在进行中的“科学项目”](https://web.archive.org/web/20100516032949/http://abcnews.go.com:80/Business/wirestory?id=10630034&page=3)，拆除合作伙伴渠道，溯源开源社区。


与本周 HPE 将放弃的旧产品[卖给 Micro Focus](https://www.ft.com/content/16ce31c4-8d5e-11e7-9084-d0c17942ba93) ，让其照料这些产品的做法相反，Oracle 的做法更残酷。Oracle [说过它将“重振 Sun 品牌”](https://www.infoworld.com/article/2627785/m-a/oracle-s-ambitious-plans-for-integrating-sun-s-technology.html)，但是事实上他们杀死的产品比 Sun 管理层曾经管理过的都要多——毫无疑问，这是“交易的艺术”。今天，和许多前 Sun 同事一样，这件事使我非常悲伤。


*（本文由 [Patreon 赞助支持](https://patreon.com/webmink)， 欢迎你也成为支持者之一！）*


 


OK
**With the Solaris team gutted, it looks like the Sun skeleton has finally been picked clean.**

![Photo taken at Menlo Park while Oracle still owned it shows the respect they had for Sun IMG_2076](https://meshedinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/sunsign.jpg)

The news from the ex-Sun community jungle drums is that the [January rumours](http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/20/oracle-lays-off-450-employees/) were true and Oracle [laid off the core talent of the Solaris and SPARC teams](https://twitter.com/drewfisher314/status/903804762373537793) on Friday (perhaps hoping to get the news lost in the Labor Day weekend). With [90% gone](http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2017/09/04/the-sudden-death-and-eternal-life-of-solaris/) according to Bryan Cantrill that surely has to mean either a skeleton-staffed maintenance-only future for the product range, especially with [Solaris 12 cancelled](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confirms-demise-of-solaris-12-effort/), or an attempt to [force Solaris workloads onto Oracle’s SPARC Cloud offering](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/05/solaris_update_plan_is_real_but_its_future_looks_cloudy_by_design/). A classic Oracle “silent EOL”, no matter what they claim as they satisfy their contractual commitments to Fujitsu and others.

On acquisition, [Ellison was scathing about Sun’s management](http://www.businessinsider.com/wow-larry-ellison-just-tore-ex-sun-ceo-jonathan-schwartz-a-new-one-2010-5?IR=T) and sure he was going to max out the opportunity. So just how good were Oracle’s decisions with Sun’s assets? I’m not really following Oracle’s business day-to-day, but here’s what seems obvious from reports:

- Java was described as the “crown jewels”, but the
[real reason](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/18/oracle-google-court-smartphone)for buying Java SE – trying to sue $8bn from Google – has failed twice. Maybe it will still yield on SCOTUS appeal? - Ellison said
[Java’s role in middleware](https://betanews.com/2009/04/20/industry-in-a-box-sun-acquisition-will-lead-to-oracle-java/)was the key to success, but Java EE is now[headed to a Foundation](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/java-ee-moving-open-source-foundation). - Oracle criticised Sun for “failing to monetise” Java (ignoring the fact Java made the market which Sun monetised with hardware in 1996-2000) and proposed a
[freemium model](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/06/oracle_dueling_jvms/)that’s not resulted in revenue. - They
[embraced NetBeans](https://www.infoworld.com/article/2627862/application-development/oracle-hails-java-but-kills-sun-cloud.html), which is now[donated to Apache](https://meshedinsights.com/2016/09/15/oracle-gets-it-right-netbeans-heads-to-apache/)(a good thing). - Bureaucracy over
[MySQL security fixes](http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2012/07/20/security-fixes-in-mysql-critical-patch-updates)led to a decent portion of the user community going over to Monty’s MariaDB fork, enough to start[a company](http://mariadb.com/)around. - Ellison said he would
[rebuild Sun’s hardware business](https://web.archive.org/web/20100516032914/http://abcnews.go.com:80/Business/wireStory?id=10630034), but[its boss quit a month ago](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/02/oracle_john_fowler_bails/)and the team behind it was part of the lay-off. - Despite
[McNealy understanding that Solaris had to be open to win in the market](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open_source/?page=3), Oracle hyped it up and[closed it down](http://www.osnews.com/story/23683/Oracle_Kills_OpenSolaris_Moves_Development_Behind_Closed_Doors). The result was this week’s layoffs, foreshadowed extensively in January. [Mishandling Hudson](https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/01/hudson-jenkins2)meant the CI business followed the Jenkins fork to CloudBees.- Oracle abandoned Sun’s identity management projects and now Forgerock uses them in a business valued around a half billion dollars powered by the customers Oracle alienated.
- Oracle decided to
[cancel Sun Cloud](https://www.infoworld.com/article/2627862/application-development/oracle-hails-java-but-kills-sun-cloud.html)and dismantled the ready-for-cloud features of Solaris, then the market went Cloud. - Oracle renamed StarOffice and
[announced a cloud version](https://web.archive.org/web/20101217212955/http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/195766)but couldn’t make it fly. Sensing the impending EOL of the project and alienated by heavy-handed treatment the community jumped ship to LibreOffice. - Just VirtualBox seems unscathed.

Instead of understanding the real failures at Sun – [taking too long to open source Solaris](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open_source/?page=3) and attempting a marketing-led approach in 2000-2002 instead of Sun’s traditional engineering-led approach – Ellison blamed the man who was landed with the task of rescuing whatever he could from the smouldering ruins left by [McNealy, Zander, Tolliver and their clan](https://www.itworld.com/article/2771904/business/where-did-sun-go-wrong-.html) and their leadership failure. Ellison never understood the pioneering approach Schwartz was taking, instead [sneering at blogging](https://web.archive.org/web/20100516032944/http://abcnews.go.com:80/Business/wirestory?id=10630034&page=2) and [calling all the work-in-progress “science projects”](https://web.archive.org/web/20100516032949/http://abcnews.go.com:80/Business/wirestory?id=10630034&page=3) while dismantling the partner channels and alienating the open source community.

The contrast with the approach HPE completed this week with its unwanted legacy products, doing [a deal with Micro Focus](https://www.ft.com/content/16ce31c4-8d5e-11e7-9084-d0c17942ba93) to look after them, could not be more stark. Oracle [said it was going to “reinvigorate the Sun brand”](https://www.infoworld.com/article/2627785/m-a/oracle-s-ambitious-plans-for-integrating-sun-s-technology.html) but instead has killed it more dead than any Sun executive managed – the “art of the deal” no doubt. Along with many former Sun staff today, that makes me very sad.

*(This post made possible by Patreon patrons. You could be one too!)*

In my opinion Oracle has always been very similar to Microsoft, with only difference, that somehow Oracle managed to present its image much better than Microsoft.

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Don’t you feel Microsoft image is getting a lot better now? With Azure and O365 plus Win 10. New CEO has changed the direction.

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The refocus on cloud has led to changes of public stance that value community and especially developer reputation more, sure. The fundamentals in the desktop business (not respecting individual control of systems and using patents to shake down innovators for unearned revenue) is still in place, just not advertised.

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Pingback: Links 3/9/2017: Linux 4.13 Out Shortly, Manjaro 17.0.3, ReactOS 0.4.6, Oracle Solaris Layoffs | Techrights

Don’t forget the sad OpenOffice.org story…

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I admit I was avoiding mentioning it, but as everyone has asked have added it to the list.

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@Libre, you beat me to OpenOffice. When MariaDB came out, I moved there. Who in their right mind would deal with Larry when there is a good alternative.

I also want to give a thumbs up to Judge William Haskell Alsup. He did a great job of educating himself about how software has been developed from epoch. Without his dedication, things could be much worse in the software copyright/patent space.

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Pingback: Oracle Murders Solaris – Mark writes

The solaris legacy though has born fruit – http://www.omniosce.org

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It’s so sad that the “about” page doesn’t even tell what it’s about. 😦 How would I know that’s a solaris or illumos fork without a lot more googling.

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I agree with Libre, you are missing the OpenOffice.org story, which had to be forked to LibreOffice.org as Oracle kept ignoring the contributions being made by the community, until in the end it just got forked.

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As one of the laid-off, it’s a sad end of a long road. Solaris 12 has been in development for over 5 years, with many features backported to Solaris 11.1, 11.2, and 11.3. But technically 12.0 is not cancelled but rebranded as 11.4. The open question: can the remaining skeleton Solaris staff get a quality 11.4 product out the door.

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What do you think of the theory that Oracle is attempting to move Solaris workloads onto the SPARC Cloud offering? Presumably a skeleton team would be able to maintain just “one” instance like that.

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Netbeans lives on. JDeveloper was migrated to Netbeans Platform so if Oracle wants to continue enhancing JDeveloper the Netbeans devs need to continue employed. Virtualbox is used widely as a platform for devs, won’ t go away anytime soon. Yes Solaris 12 was removed from the roadmap, but replaced with Solaris 11.next. So, what is the hurry, what pressing features does solaris need? Everyone and their mother is moving to “the cloud” FAST. Nobody except Google-Amazon-IBM is buying blades to run in-house anymore. The market and sales are hence slowing. It all comes down to MAKING MONEY which is something Ellison understands and Sun did not, as it was hemorraging money during its last few decades.

Another innacuracy in your article, Oracle did not sue Google for DESKTOP Java but for

MOBILE JAVA

Desktop Java is alive and well… in fact Java 9 will be released soon, with OpenJDK made the reference implementation by none other than Oracle.

Did I mention that Oracle Linux is also doing well? Oracle’s cloud business is doing well too.

SPARC is a though call. Competing with AMD and Intel on the top and ARM from below is EXPENSIVE. Again, Oracle wants to make money from services, much like IBM which also de-emphasized its PowerPC business.

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Hi Max,

Yes, there are current-market justifications for various decisions, and things like Netbeans do live on. What I’m discussing in this article is not that. When Oracle bought Sun, they brutally criticised its current leadership and bragged about how they were going to do really great things, much better things than the awful management team before could do, tremendous things. Having a long memory, I’m thus comparing that bragging with the actual outcomes.

You’re wrong about the Google lawsuit – it is actually about Java SE.

S.

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Sad news … I don`t understand these games.

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Thanks for the thoughtful write-up. It was becoming clearer to me in last few months when Oracle kept on pushing on moving to a Linux IaaS service rather than Solaris based infrastructure. Whatever the game, I believe companies should come forward and clarify their stand and road map instead of pushing customers for their personal gains. Folks like me will always remember the quality time we had with Sun Solaris..

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If they buy or takeovers any company that means that company & its employees are going to garbage.

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Reblogged this on dave levy online and commented:

Simon was close to the politics of Sun’s “Dash to Open”, my feeling is that Sun had failed before Schwartz was appointed, there was no longer room for differentiated hardware company; Oracle’s failure to monetise the SPARC product line may have been caused by management hubris, but the long term economics of microprocessors and the establishment of distributed & collaborative software technology was key. Sun were late to adopt Plan 9 and making Solaris, an SMP/UMA big iron solution was a cul-de-sac it couldn’t escape from.

I had promised not to write about Sun’s failure, but I am better now.

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The decision to kill off x86 Solaris in the early 2000’s and the bad press, bad customer feelings that followed was the beginning of the end. That and not taking Linux seriously. Buying Cobalt was odd. I don’t agree with you about Swartz. He wasn’t serious enough, he really didn’t care. He could always hightail back to Kinsey with his golden parachute and his wine obsession. Most of us thought he was a plant to take the company down & kill it off. . Giving away IP for the POSSIBILITY of a hardware sale was, and still is, just plain nuts! He seemed to go off the rails a bit in his blog, especially toward the end. There is a reason that no one on Earth has those posts archived.

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The blog was deleted by Oracle when they realised it harmed their case against Google according to Mike Masnik:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110724/11263315224/oracle-deletes-jonathan-schwartzs-old-blog-which-excitedly-celebrated-googles-use-java-android.shtml

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The SPARCstation may be gone, but Forth will live on for eternity. Forth is to computer science what math is to physics.

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Forth was also in the bootloader of the PowerPC-based macs. And it’s still in the bootloader of FreeBSD.

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That might be overstating things just a tad. I’ve been a programmer since the 80’s (mostly embedded, including bootloaders) and have never used Forth or even come across it. The wiki page on Forth lists certain projects it is used in – something not even attempted with a language such as C, because it is used everywhere.

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How Forth is related here? It was invented by Chuck Moore who was not working for Sun nor Oracle. Sure, it is used in bootloaders. Maybe Sun engineers did their implementation but Forth has more implemetations than apps.

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How Forth is related here? It was invented by Chuck Moore who was not working for Sun nor Oracle. Sure, it is used in bootloaders. Maybe Sun engineers did their implementation but Forth has more implemetations than apps.

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Thanks for posting Simon. We just celebrated 20 years of Tech Titan luncheons here in Dallas this year and you were one of the thought leaders who came to educate us about Open Source in the early days. Oracle may have killed Sun but the spirit of the people who grew up there will never die. Thought leadership was in our DNA. The company cared about it employees and it’s customers. We had high ethical standards. That’s the culture that makes great companies and Sun was one of those. Oracle doesn’t come close. #sun #java

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The sun has finally set. Sad, but also a relief. Nothing left to be destroyed by Oracle, pain is gone now.

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Pingback: Oracle Finally Killed Sun | thechrisshort

What about the Unified Communications System (Sun’s iPlanet/Sun One) Carrier Grade eMail, Calendar, Chat product line?

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I’d forgotten all about that. I wonder if anyone can tell us.

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I am hoping to hear that one. 😞. thanks for the article

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What is going to be the impact on the illumos ecosystem? How long for stuff like VMware to stop support for Solaris based kernels? What would be the best move for an illumos distro maintainer?

Your personal thoughts will be very appreciated.

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Those are all great questions. The open source Solaris community has been cut off for quite some time so I’d not expect them to be negatively affected.

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Pingback: New top story on Hacker News: Oracle Finally Killed Sun – The Internet Yard

VirtualBox “seems unscathed”?

It seems already being left to die off.

In particular, after 3 years (see https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/13471), there’s still no support for Wayland.

As a dev that’s been using Virtualbox for years and currently locked into Fedora, I’m looking for alternatives…

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Try Proxmox

That is where we are going from VirtualBox

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I’ve been saying for years that Oracle must not realize they own VirtualBox, other than rebranding it as Oracle VirtualBox, because they hadn’t ruined it yet. Good to know that they even screwed that up. I’ll look into Proxmox, maybe even get them for FLOSS Weekly.

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Don’t kid yourself, HP’s is where acquisitions go to die. Just look at Mercury, ArcSight, and others. While it’s too bad about Sun ( disclaimer I worked there from ’87-94 ) as Scott would say, ” It’s lunch or be lunch.”

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The Carrier Grade eMail product was licensed to Sun. They did not own it.

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Pingback: Sun set: Oracle closes down last Sun product lines | Fleekist.com

I’m Roger Faulkner’s (RAF) daughter. I don’t understand a lot of this article since I’m not a hacker. I just want to know if this means that PROCFS will be dead in the water. Will his disappear?

Bethany Faulkner

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Just so you know, I have seen your father’s name mentioned more times as a role model in the comments from the people laid off than any other.

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Bethany – your Dad’s legacy is going NOWHERE! It lives on not only in any Oracle Solaris deployment that still moves bits, but it also lives on in illumos – the still and forever open-source successor to OpenSolaris. Here’s procfs, for the world to see, for example:

http://src.illumos.org/source/xref/illumos-gate/usr/src/uts/common/fs/proc/

I had the pleasure of working at least a little with Roger. He was a champion not only of his own technology, but others’ as well, including some things I did.

Roger’s legacy will never EVER disappear.

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Another aspect of Roger’s legacy which is very, very much alive, is the attitude towards software architecture and engineering which he fostered. We all carry a bit of that with us.

#WWRD

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Bethany, Roger’s baby /proc lives on not only in Illimos, but also in Linux. They extended it to do many more things than just expose the process model. Roger hated that on grounds of purity, but it’s a mark of a good idea when it gets expanded far beyond its creator’s original intentions.

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Thank you so much, gentlemen. It’s been a year of gradually losing little bits of him. I’m relieved his baby lives on. I’m so sorry for all those who’ve lost their jobs. I’m sure there would have been much loud swearing coming from his upstairs office, had Roger lived to see this.

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My time at Sun was one of the best learning experiences I ever had. It was definitely a trial by fire. A trial made easier by the great people I had the pleasure of knowing and working with. Sun became great by placing the customer first. Sun’s downfall started when they lost sight of their customers’ needs and refused to see the potential in the average consumer user. There is a lesson that can be learned from Sun’s sunset.

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After having been in the IT business for 40 years i can tell that this lesson will never be learned. L’histoire se repete, but not the same way.

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It took Ellison 9 years to kill Sun, that in my opinion, was the biggest insult, it should have been swift and painless.

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It seemed to me that the Sun business was doomed from the beginning, as Oracle exists on high software margins. The low margin systems business was a drag on the business. It was justified on strategic factors, such as developing on Sparc and leveraging the huge Java following. They were always a top down company, both under McNeally and Ellison. They suffrred the same fate as other top down companies such as DEC, IBM, and HP. Sun was always stocked with engineering talent, even at the end. They should find jobs easy enough.

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Sun always put HW before SW and especially services. Man cannot live by HW alone it sayeth somewhere. I worked for Sun for 5 years and here are some of the SW backtracks and executions;

• Genesys, a futuristic view of linked nodes with dynamic changes to almost everything in the way of resources one desired. This was touted widely for a while, and even I went on the road ‘selling’ the vision but it suddenly disappeared

• JOE (Object Request Broker)

• NEO (renamed from Distributed Objects Everywhere)

• Enterprise Manager

• Domain Manager

• Site Manager

• Job Scheduler

• Java Management API (JMAPI)

• Javastations 1 and 2

• A7000 disk subsystem after the Encore acquisition (I project managed the UK side of this)

• Scott McNealy’s ‘auction’ plans

• Numerous ‘unproductive acquisitions’ over the years , the latest being Tarantella (old SCO)

• The demise of the ‘Sparc and Solaris’ is all philosophy and the acceptance of Linux

• Utility grid computing

• Senior manager exits, compounding the earlier Ed Zander exit – unannounced and only visible by searching the Internet.

The old Communist empire has nothing on Sun when it comes to covering things up.

Having said all that, they were a great company to work for, unlike Oracle, who I also worked for. Oracle were a ‘hire and fire a will’ company and probably still are. People disappeared as quickly as they did in Nazi Germany.

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So sad to see a such waste ….

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Pingback: tinman alley » Bye bye Sun and Solaris :-(

And what of VDI? Sun Ray? Ellison coined the term “The Network Computer” back in the 90’s and had a brilliant offering, staffed by really knowledgeable, enthusiastic, brilliant people and he killed it. I guess because although it was a profitable business, it just didn’t make enough money.

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The beginning of the end for Sun was the dot-com crash. Sun servers powered the dot-coms then when that all came tumbling down, all that equipment went on the used market and Sun could no longer sell new product with all that nearly-new stuff going for a deep discount.

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… sadly very true. I was part of that epoch moment, having previously enjoyed a successful career in eCommerce implementations, made possible with SUN engineering.

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Totally agree

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Sun was dedicated to and driven by its channel partners. The direct sales force was great to partner with even in the largest of accounts. Oracle has always been a direct sales force company. They claimed to be channel friendly but hot air is hot air. They really lacked top down leadership in sales. Thats what McNealy got and Ellison didnt.

If you had an Oracle oportunity from 2008 on then 3 different internal Oracle sales groups pounced. None of them knowing or understanding the role of the other.

leadershipsalesdirection.

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To be fair, Oracle kept Sun going longer than folks expected, and much longer than the life it would have had at IBM, it’s first suitor. Scott probably had trouble sleeping seeing it go to IBM, and better for a silicon valley home with closer culture match. Oracle made a kickbutt DB stack sitting on Sun HW with it’s Exa line, even running on Solaris, that still runs circles around other stacks.

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