You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200.

IIRC they won business awards for this.

Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?

This is precisely the role of the sales person for something like a service, but for a physical product it is pretty egregious. There is no greater sin than leaving money on the table. There's an old story about someone offering a quote that was apparently pretty low based on reaction, so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher.

This is how license compliance shakedowns work. Make sure your DRM is more flexible than theicensing terms, find an overage and see what you can get the customer to agree to.

I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.

You can even run most cool Python, Go, Java, Rust, PHP among others, on systems like z/OS.

I was kinda stunned; there’s a level of balls involved in selling an x millions machine and having it fail closed that I’m sort of impressed by but also utterly appalled they’d treat their big customers like that..

I mean surely to fuck it could have been an automated reminder email to the mothership and not just: sorry folks no banking for you today.

The rise of the Internet made channel sales handoffs a weak point in the business model. I bet this missed sale went to a reseller who didn't respond and Sun didn't have any controls or visibility on that failure.

1999 and 2002 correspond roughly to telecom and dotcom bubbles popping. So open source operating systems were also pulled up into these positions through a lot of work and by the early 2000s it was kind of obvious this was the way forward.

2008 financial crisis really knocked the high end (RISC/UNIX/Itanium) and started the long migration to renting vs owning. In hindsight it's remarkable how much money used to just be there in the economy of all this. But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.

Ah, sorry, I was referring to the CMT architecture.

IIRC it was $1bn or so, and Sun only had like $6bn in the bank. It was a desperate play when Sun needed help.

> I think he didn't realize how externally this would look for the viability of Solaris on x86.

I'd love to see that. Yeah, it didn't go well. It was a disaster.

> > - Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.

> Can you give some context. I am interested in Sun history and I don't know that one.

In 2004 Sun closed Sun PS. Well, it... didn't go away completely in that what was left became Sun Client Solutions, but the lay-offs IIRC hurt that unit a great deal.

> (Edit: I see you mean Sparc T1, but those chips were trash, they were not to late. They were good marketing above good product)

Yeah, and it was too late to edit my comment. My bad. But yes. The SPARC folks had some great ideas in the T line, but it was a) way too late, b) didn't have access to latest node size, so it wasn't going to be great-performing, c) performance sucked.

> Also StorageTek.

Eh, not sure about that. The acquisitions of StorageTek and Procom were the only ones I can think of where Sun actually managed to capitalize on what it acquired. The Procom side contributed a Microsoft RPC stack and an SMB/CIFS stack, which was in fact integrated into Solaris. The StorageTek side became the Sun storage appliance.

In 2009 Sun's greatest hope was that its systems work on the storage appliance was going to succeed and save it. That stack was far far better than NetApp's and anyone else's. Of course, that didn't materialize in time, and we know the rest of the story.

With all these mistakes there's enough there to think about many possible alternative paths Sun could have taken, but... there's no point, it's done. I don't recommend dwelling upon much unless you're building a business school case study, and for that I think Sun is an excellent case candidate, especially given that you can compare Sun to Apple and others, so you can see what could have been.

My diagnostic is that McNealy checked out with the 2001 crisis, Schwartz was just a really, really bad steward, and no one wanted to take the hatchet to the vendor lock-in products that were holding Sun back. In 2002 the right thing to have done was to announce less investment in SPARC and start winding it down -- that would have freed many billions for other things later in the 00s, and it would have saved Sun PS. But perhaps in 2002 Sun didn't have the systems expertise needed for the transformation it needed to undertake.

Meanwhile Apple was never wedded to an ISA for long, and even now that they make their own CPUs they could easily switch if they had to. I say 'easily', but it's monstrously expensive, yet for Apple it's totally doable. Steve Jobs wasn't afraid of disrupting Apple itself. That's what Sun needed: internal disruption.

They, and the software that ran on it (Dataviews), and their customers (Westinghouse Software in my case) were all soon undone by the arrival of powerful commodity Wintel.

Motif did have a reputation for being a total drag to develop with, though. It's based on Xt. So is Athena, so if you've ever written an Xaw app it's pretty similar.

Only if you never repurchased.

Or you could DCA out: have a standard policy that no single stock can be more that x% of your portfolio, and as any one gets above that limit you crystallize profits. It's no different than having a 60/40 portfolio and rebalancing your equities if they get >60%.

I lean more towards passive and (total) market index funds, and just riding the roller coaster, as anything else is fairly either impossible or too time consuming:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co...

My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well.

Combined with Linux package managers being infinitely better, the GNU core utilities having so many more conveniences and options than the Solaris equivalents, I felt like Sun was this dinosaur that couldn’t die fast enough. I’ll still never understand why so many people praise Sun for its engineering culture when free software seemed so superior to me at the time.

My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.

Maybe in the 90s the standards were different. Maybe their tech was better. But by the time I ever used their software is was the butt of jokes.

Linux took over the world because any licensing model that requires a per CPU license simply can’t work in a massively scalable situation like server farms and cloud.

Then Intel came out with dual-core processors, which was the new hotness. So he wrote a followup page, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills".

At the time, I thought they were funny, and made reasonable arguments. But in retrospect, they were just trying to distract the customers from the fact that Intel was overtaking them.

Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability.

Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.

Linux won on the server side because they got just as right as Unix. The crappy UI (windows) was the one that didn't work with shell scripting, didn't work with ssh, etc.