Comment by bachmeier

Yeah, I've never understood this part of Joel's analysis.

Sun were a hardware specialist. They wanted commoditised software, i.e. fungible, cheaply available everywhere in the same form, so that it is not a differentiator, as it is not an area of differentiation that they believed they'd win on, unlike hardware.

Further, they had a reasonable fear that software would more and more be made to run in only one place - Windows - which would lock them out of large parts of the market (like a car company whose cars ran on a fuel available in only a small number of remote locations).

So, they did their best to commoditise software with write-once run-anywhere. It fits perfectly with the strategy Joel outlines. Now all the software vendors are directly competing, as they can't use hardware tie-ins, and producing more software (write once), and all this should drive down software prices, and thereby leave more money on the table for superior hardware, which will become (they hoped) the key competitive advantage in the market-place.

Clearly, they lost anyway. As far as I can tell, that was because they lost on their strength: the market wanted commodity hardware (ever improving with Moores law, anyway) for vast data centres, rather than more capable and expensive hardware.

Yeah, if they could have built amazing software, like hardware producing Apple with their popular consumer OS and other software products, then they could maybe have won, but then if they couldn't win on hardware, their strength, why should anyone expect them to win on software?

(Okay, Java alone proves they had serious software chops, and I hear much of their software was good, but clearly they didn't think they could compete with the entire Microsoft ecosystem of software (and then there is Linux, FreeBSD, et cetera...), and I tend to agree).

Basically, they bet on hardware in an age of software. This wasn't a failure to commoditise their complement, but a failure to choose (to the extent they had a choice...) the right side of a complement divide.

The stories you heard do not contradict the analysis from Joel, do they?

"They thought they could make money from Java": yes, but if you are a hardware company, you shouldn't push for the development of software that commoditizes your server.

"They were worried about Windows-only software": if you make money from hardware, you fight Microsoft by integrating/developing/fomenting software that can run exclusively on your stack. IOW, do what Apple did and still does.

i think sun tried to sell more servers and storage systems by giving free access to the tools (JVM/JDK) that would simplify enterprise software development - without having to worry about core dumps or very long compilation times. It might be that Joel was too focused on Microsoft in order to see that.

Also SUN was selling licenses for very expensive J2EE stuff (remember EJB? That's the stuff that was replaced by spring) Giving free access to the JDK would make sense, as making the complement cheaper to create demand for EJB (that would have worked if EJB would have been easier to use)

Java was initially focused on small devices, but that was not it's main use case at the turn of the century. i think phone hardware was too limited for Java until a few years later, when Sun was no longer around (actually we had the epic Oracle vs Google case, which might have been a Sun vs Google case - sans acquisition by Oracle)

It may well be that Linux became good enough for this market segment and thereby turned server hardware (i.e. Sun) into a commodity, but that's a different story.

The original target for Java (Oak) was set top boxes. Arguably Sun was trying to commoditize the set top box industry so that they could sell expensive servers to cable operators. Then someone decided to open source the result (engineers aren’t always great economists / financial analysts).

Amusingly in the 25 years since, set top box manufacturers have commoditized themselves very effectively.