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Yesterday, a blog series began to appear at blogs.sun.com explaining the top ten reasons why the sun is setting and particularly talking about failure to understand the X86 market at Sun. I began to read it, and to comment as Ive worked for Sun Microsystems and for Oracle and have enjoyed my times with both companies. My blog comment was: "I had a 386i, it was 20 grand list, but I bought it for 500 quid. It came from Sun East Coast Division who were the talent behind the SunPCI boards which were marvellous things. The problem with the later x86 stuff is theres little or no Sun DNA inside. My x4150 could be made by anyone, no hostid chip, AMI bios, taiwan parts. I installed VMWare and run Windows Server VM's on it. Even the Cobalt acquisition was a mess - Sun just bought it and killed it. My Raq 550 has only just been decomissioned after ten years running 24x7 what a box it was.
Im so sad for Sun. I dont think it will be understood by Oracle." The posting was at http://blogs.sun.com/dbaigent/entry/the_10_thing_that_ruined, but now its gone it just returns a 404 error. Perhaps it was upsetting to some people, but personally I think the author should post the rest of the series. NOTHING good comes from this kind of censorship. You either roll with the punches in support of openness and the 21st centure net generation way of working or you return to corporate managed communication. I post a screenshot of the blog below, and you can find it in googles cache http://bit.ly/WCBG0 
Sun was a fabulous company with energy and bite and flair and technology. Somewhere it got lost. I was always always sorry that I left Sun, as I was very proud to have been there when the SparcSTATION 1 launched and changed the workstation market overnight. I was proud of my product and of the company. Sure they took some decisions then I didnt like (cancelling InBox, the forerunner to cc:Mail and MS Mail but Client Server in 1989 - that was novel and should have changed the world but didnt - I digress). You see I cant help feeling that Sun has been bankrupt of strategy now since the dot com crash. They acquired Cobalt networks around that time, and could not figure out what to do with it except to slowly kill it then desupport it then finally open source the user interface which was after all the thing that was brilliant in enabling mom and pop hosters to stay away from the complexity. My Cobalt Raq 550 just retured after ten years of running 24x7 except for power outages and one fan failure in all that time. It was slow but it just stayed up. There was a path for high performance workstations perhaps less so for servers - Apple found it - and writing this on a MacBook Pro running Unix, and all that goes with it shows just how far Sun went the wrong way. Sun could have bought Apple for a dime before Jobs return and the injection of NeXT technology. I still in many ways think a Sun - Apple merge would be better than a Sun Oracle merge. Apple could use some of those technologists, especially on Mac OS X Server which is Unix with MySQL Apache and php after all. My personal view is that Suns purchase of MySQL was clutching at straws. It cant be positive now at Oracle. Theres only a status quo or a negative path. so why do it? Can it really be true that Sun had no idea it was an option to sell up when they bought MySQL? Id be amazed if there wasnt already a plan with Oracle and IBM in it. Oracle and IBM both have plenty of database technology so what was that all about? Sun have never ever been any good at infrastructure software (remember the Sun-Netscape alliance). Solaris is a jewel, but even Solaris is byzantine in comparison to more nimble Unix and Unix Like operating systems. Java is Java and perhaps was the single thing that kept Sun going so far. But these are technology platforms, not infrastructure platforms. So I return to the why MySQL? The founders have left, leaving it to Oracle to slice up the remainder. Its a fairly bleak prospect I think. Perhaps MySQL will be positioned as departmental competition to SQL Server, and Oracle can reposition itself higher. Dont think that works really. I was at Lotus when we had two really great products - Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Improv - a next generation spreadsheet with some unique pivot table capabilities. I had a great demo script that showed data interoperability from a flat file database, some fancy charting ans perspective mode or 3D mode in 1-2-3 (/wwp for the cogniscenti) and then a natural language formula and the ability to drag and pivot data in Improv "Why do I need to buy another spreadsheet" said every IT director I ever demonstrsted both of them to. Microsoft implemented pivot tables as an rotten first release add-in, then a core and fundamental part of Excel and it was the end of the line for 1-2-3 and Improv both. History repeats itself and MySQL and Oracle looks like 1-2-3 and Improv to me. Dont get me started on OpenOffice. What the heck are Oracle going to do with that....I really need to think about that one having been at Oracle in the 'PowerBrowser, InterOffice and HatTrick (a java office suite for the moribund network computer) eras.
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