Java has been one of the primary languages I’ve used as an engineer since about 2009 or so, which coincidentally coincided with the sale of Sun to Oracle. I wasn’t very aware of the history of the industry until I started poking around a few years ago, and seeing as Sun more-or-less predated me by a few years, I wanted to understand what they were like in their hayday, and what made them die.

Brian Cantrill was one of the primary engineers on the Solaris project, their operating system that was supposedly quite phenomenal. They built the entire kernel and OS themselves, eschewing the Linux kernel and competing with Microsoft’s Server offering.

Brian left a comment on a 7-year old HN post that seems to do a good job of describing their downfall:

That said, I think Sun’s problem was pretty simple: we thought we were a hardware company long after it should have been clear that we were a systems company. As a result, we made overpriced, underperforming (and, it kills me to say, unreliable) hardware. And because we were hardware-fixated, we did not understand the economic disruptive force of either Intel or open source until it was too late. (Believe me that some of us understood this: I worked extensively on both Solaris x86 and with the SPARC microprocessor teams – and I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.)

…One could argue that our technological pivots were too late, and they may well have been, but I think that the urgency and focus that we felt in the engine room (aided by the bone-cold water that was at our knees and rising) was simply not felt or appreciated in the wheelhouse: I feel that we could have made it had there been more interest at the top of Sun in the mechanics of running and managing a multi-billion dollar business…

The top comment and the post itself are worth looking at too.

Brian also has a great Usenix talk that was luckily recorded which goes into colorful detail about the acquisition by Oracle.