But yeah, the lack of package manager hurt a lot, and there were competing third-party package managers which had totally different pro's/con's and packages and were incompatible with each other... what a mess.
Compared to apt/yum it was kinda comical... but the first party software really was excellent otherwise.
Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome -- and I think it's pretty telling that Sun's executive leadership basically went on to do more or less nothing after Sun. I loved Sun -- but it was a breeding ground for engineers, not executive leadership.
The fault is always upper management not doing their job. Even if one department really would be that bad (which again they are not), upper management allowed them to be that bad.
I have a bunch of Aruba switches and this is what we do, because it's a lot cheaper.
For Aruba I think it was 1:1; a support contract was the same price as the device itself over 2 years or something.
Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices, so your cost scales with the amount you have... so I'm not sure I follow what you're saying..
Unless you mean to imply that you're replacing units more than once every 2 years, in which case of course you're right... but then I might consider going with another vendor entirely because that is a pretty terrible reliability record.
Sun's heyday was in the boom. The fish were jumping in the boat. So naturally they were building bigger and bigger boats.
There was always the one-off ideas that might have gone here or there, but that core server cow just seemed like an endless source of cash. Thus they neglected the workstation market and ironically, the market for anything bigger than one single server rack. They didn't understand horizontal scaling, and the rise of cheap-but-replaceable consumer hardware like how Google did things was alien to them. They poo-poo'ed Linux, they killed and then unkilled Solaris x86, and a number of other things.
I do miss Sun though. As far as engineering goes, they were a very serious company full of serious engineers. Basically the polar opposite of 10X tech bros and startup culture.
When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.
Even ZFS was way better integrated with the Linux kernel even while Solaris was supposedly maintained.
By the early 2000's, 1) Linux was solid, why bother with Solaris? 2) ebay and other channels were flooded with used Sun hardware from failed dot-com companies anyway. No need to buy new.
All development and production deployments was being done across Solaris, Aix and HP-UX in regards to UNIX flavours.
You can't just say that without sharing those too!
Whatever everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. Not even Xerox. I've used aa Xerox Alto, a Sun workstation, an LMI CADR, and a Symbolics 3600, and none of them were as carefully crafted as a Macintosh with a tiny memory and a floppy disk. Next inherited this ethic.
Jobs valued the person using the machine more than anything else about the machine.
Nobody knows how the future will be. There are lots of options. There are self hostable open models today - they are not as good, but some report they are good enough. Right now I don't have the hardware to try them (I could - if I'm willing to accept a small number of tokens per minute - useful means more tokens per second as I can get in an hour). However I expect in a few years I'll be able buy consumer hardware with good enough GPUs (or perhaps an AI chip???). Will anyone other than a few hobbyists buy them? time will tell.
It was a cool idea. It will keep coming back again and again. But at Sun's price points around the early 2000s, it was a loser, and I actually agree with the market in this instance. Sun Ray was a flop.
It lived on in the world of Windows Terminal Services and things like Citrix - maybe still does in some places.
Which is why it is kind of ironic having folks discussing microservices as something groundbreaking.
coreyh14444•48m ago
sschueller•35m ago
At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
bombcar•15m ago
thevillagechief•14m ago
ganoushoreilly•11m ago
I prefer the "This is the price" model and just make it consistent. I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general.
Just let me buy it and move on.
jmclnx•28m ago
IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
fidotron•13m ago
I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed.
So when we could move to Dell we did.
arethuza•11m ago