Comment by sfg
4 years ago
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.
Sun was destroyed by commodity Intel hardware on one side and free open source software (Apache/Linux/GCC, etc) on the other. In the very early 90s Sun workstations and servers could do things x86 boxes couldn’t do. Once that changed they were doomed.
That makes sense.
What were these unique 90s features?
On desktops, Sun workstations had graphics capabilities PCs could only dream of.
Most multi cpu x86 systems were file servers built for parallel I/O. Although it was technically possible to build symmetric multiprocessing x86 systems, and some vendors did so, the PC architecture specifically wasn’t conducive to it, software support was very limited and overall they didn’t work very well. Mostly they were hacky dual cpu systems, meanwhile Sun was selling highly efficient 4 and 8 cpu systems with high bandwidth architectures. The first SMP system I used was a Sparcserver 630MP in 1992. We had some x86 boxes running Xenix but they were pitiful in comparison.
Sun didn’t need to market expansion cards as “plug and play” because how else would they work? On x86 it was a wondrous and largely mythical concept deep into the 90s.
64 bit SPARC systems were available 8 years before x86-64 although that was mid 90s.