Comment by zabzonk 9 days ago
Yes, well Scott McNealy will never be my idea of a brilliant man. Or Sun of a particularly good company - where are they now?
I remember one investment bank I worked for, starting:
IT tech: Would you like a Sun workstation?
Me: Nope, I would like a top of range Windows PC, with two or more screens.
IT tech: Yeah, OK, all the traders say that too. We're throwing those Suns in the dumpster.
Just yesterday I personally witnessed pallets of Sun/Oracle equipment being unloaded. I’ll admit, it made me nostalgic!
They’re still out there. Maybe not visible to normal folks, but I know for a fact until very recently the Chicago Mercantile Exchange used their hardware in great quantities— maybe even as the underlying hardware for their matching engines, though I admit this is conjecture on my part. They don’t exactly let exchange customers in those rooms!
I miss their 10k & 15k chassis. Solid kit for their day.
The spiritual successor for Sun machines is Oxide (lots of ex-Sun folks). And Sun got acquired by Oracle so it’s still technically around on the software side via virtual box and Java.
That's the point though.
What's left of Sun is basically a startup founded by a few ex-employees, some open-source software, and the rest of their IP being milked by Larry Ellison.
I'm not talking about SunOS or Solaris. I'm talking about Java, dtrace, OpenZFS, and a various other random bits of Sun legacy still floating around in modern open-source systems.
I love Oxide's podcast. I checked its career page a few times but they are only hiring for field sales.
Sun made incredibly good hardware and software. They were incredibly good technologists, responsible for lots of innovations, but they were bad at business. So in that sense they were the opposite of Microsoft.