[svlug] Blockchain

[Karen Shaeffer]

On Sat, Jun 30, 2018 at 09:06:50AM -0700, Michael Eager wrote:
> On 06/30/2018 07:18 AM, Karen Shaeffer wrote:
> > And the crash of Sun Microsystems also correlated with the dot-com bust
> > in 2000. IMHO, this market shock changed the linux adoption curve
> > trajectory within the business community dramatically accelerating the
> > business adoption rate of linux at the expense of Sun. Furthermore it
> > was the early support of linux by IBM and Intel along with Google's use
> > case that set the stage for this meteoric rise of linux. Just thinking
> > out loud.
> 
> Sun Micro's demise was not simply correlated with the Dot-Com bust.  It 
> was caused by it.
> 
> Sun made many missteps in 2001, 2002, and later, as it's stock price 
> followed the downside of its parabolic rise and descent.  (I left Sun 
> before the bust with a pocket full of stock which had gone through 
> multiple splits.  Unfortunately, I didn't bale out until the stock lost 
> 80+% of its peak value.  If this had been a flight on the same curve as 
> the SUNW stock price, that would have been me in the back screaming 
> "pull up, pull up!")
> 
> Sun had a moth-like approach-avoidance relationship with Open Source. 
> They released OpenSolaris in 2005 (as with most Sun things post-2000, 
> this was too little, too late).  OpenSolaris was an in-house project 
> with outside contributors.  Developer contributions were to support 
> Sun's proprietary product.  Linux, in contrast, was an outside project 
> with in-house (e.g., IBM, RedHat) contributors.  Developer contributions 
> supported everyone's products.
> 
> Sun's Solaris could have given Linux much more competition than it did 
> (at the time, Solaris was technically much more advanced than Linux).

During the emergence of the dot-com bust, I was doing linux systems
engineering work at startups. One of my routine tasks was performance
analysis comparing the performance of application stacks running on
intel-linux versus sun-solaris. In a price-performance comparison,
linux-intel was an order of magnitude more competitive than sun-solaris
was in the context of comparable hardware scale. Sure, sun-solaris was
an awesome example of highly optimized hw-OS at scale. And at scale this
meant huge extremely expensive sun systems. But the market had turned to
using low-end, COTS linux-intel systems in server farms. And Sun's low
end solaris systems were not highly optimized. Quite the opposite. These
low end intel-linux HW-OS systems were so much more cost effective than
sun's solution it was a no brainer for companies to adopt intel COTS hw
running linux. And this led to the fall of Sun Microsystems IMHO.

thanks for your comments.

humbly,
Karen



> As far as I know, Sun didn't actively discourage other companies from 
> productizing Solaris, like IBM was doing with Linux, but I think that 
> Sun's attitude was "why should we do anything which will support our 
> competitors?"  IBM was never going to sign up to support Solaris.  (One 
> can see that in the name chosen for IBM's IDE product, Eclipse.)
> 
> -- 
> Michael Eager    eager at eagerm.com
> 1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306
> 
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-- 
Karen Shaeffer                 The subconscious mind is driven by your deeply
Neuralscape Services           held beliefs -- not your deeply held desires.