Sun Microsystems Autopsy: Death by Reverse Darwinism
Founded in 1982, Sun Microsystems, a landmark in Silicon Valley, originated the UNIX workstation market with the mantra “The network is the computer”. The Sun wikipedia page is a good place to start, next try High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems by Karen Southwick, the Oracle acquisition is where it will finish.
After missing several opportunities to work for Sun in the early days, I settled for a job with Solbourne Computer, the first of a few Sun compatible companies. Solbourne made the first multiprocessor version of Sun servers and did quite well as a result. I paid cash for my first house, thank you Solbourne Computer. In return for expanding the Sun market share, Sun made it virtually impossible for Solbourne (meaning born of sun) to succeed. Strangely enough Solbourne ended up becoming a successful Oracle systems integrator, but I digress.
The Sun corporate culture was set by the executive staff, hiring the top talent Silicon Valley had to offer. Sun CEO Scott McNealy set the maverick standard with the often repeated “To ask permission is to seek denial” dictum. Scott even named one of his sons Maverick! The best and brightest were hired, were promoted, innovation was king. The likes of Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, John Gilmore, Whitfield Diffie, Radia Perlman, Marc Tremblay, Ned Freed, John Gage, James Gosling, Jon Bosak, went through Sun’s revolving doors, some more than once. Insiders say Jonathan I. Schwartz was once one of those, but now that he strapped on a $12M+ golden parachute the only time you see him walking around SUN is with two armed body guards.
Unfortunately when the dot.com bubble burst so did Sun. From my experience working with Sun I would call it death by Reverse Darwinism or the rise of mediocrity. Sun middle management is bloated with people that are good in meetings, intelligent people that talk a good game, but are as maverick as Sarah Palin, and accomplish about as much. Analysys Paralysis runs rampant, these people are simply windsocks going wherever the prevailing breeze takes them. Reverse Darwinism is a fatal disease for technology dependent companies. Any time you see a company fly so high, accomplish so much, only to flat line, the cause of death is most always reverse darwinism, believe it.
Oracle is quite the opposite, more of an autocracy, run not so much by founder Larry Ellison, but by President Charles E. Phillips, Jr. and President and CFO Safra A. Catz, who translate Larry’s visions into revenues. One of Fortunes 50 most powerful women, also known as the Oracle Enforcer, Safra Catz will be the ultimate defibrillator for the mediocrity rank and file that brought Sun to its knees. Expect a literal blood bath, more pink slips than Victoria’s Secret, thousands more on the global dole.
Even more shocking is that the DOJ approved the acquisition and the rubber stamping EU did NOT! The sticking point is MySQL (as mentioned in my previous blog) which accounts for an insignificant $300M of the more than $19B database market. Think of who the winners are in this acquisition: certainly Oracle and Sun, and the soon to be combined customer base. The losers: IBM and HP. Now ask yourself who is really behind the EU delay?
Interesting. Seems an oversight not to talk about Sun products, though. That also might have something to do with it, don’t you think?
To me Oracle is gambling. The result will be binary at the end: 0 or 1.
@Dennis, I think what Daniel has written has a lot to be said for it; there are many other influences, certainly, but the echo-chamber effect of the middle management was very significant.
Re: the products, more than a few of them were ill-thought-out but many MANY more were axed just as they were getting traction with customers; corporate ADD and not wanting to be left holding a hot potato were the cause of that – strategy and vision should come from the top and be committed to, and they were not.
“Strategy of the quarter” is not a viable approach to business.
As a former Sun employee – I can vouch a little bit for middle management, however the real death of Sun was when it lost it’s values with it’s people and quality and started serious inbreeding practices.
The financial bean counter approach to HR that started about 5 years ago drove middle management to focus 40% of their efforts on inbreeding networking – not to add value to bridging departments – to secure a secure position when the numbers game changed. Another 20% of effort was put into creating new dashboard or rigorous metrics (to quote unquote show value and thought leadership). These metrics where dropped in lieu of the latest trend 18 months later.
Saving a nickel on parts starting costing Sun dollars when they tried to shave off every cost they could in manufacturing. This also destroyed our reputation with our customers. Look back about 5 years this was really starting to boil into Sun’s bottom line.
Oh and yes the Sun Sigma process that never really produced results – as everyone was Siloed and had timecaps on them. We produced a lot of Black Belts and angst with always re-inventing something old and working well.
Jonathan S was not and administrator – simply a loud mouth puffer fish with no loyalty to any of Sun. Him and McNealy walked across the street and made a deal with Larry about 2.5 years ago (as a safety net). Many of us saw this when Sun started to axe all their homegrown customized and strategic apps in for an unproven and ugly all ecompassing Oracle 11i solution designed to replace every system within Sun.
Why pay one billion for an open source Database system than to do a favor for Larry. All the key technical staff were let go right after the buy.
Dirty dirty business.
but it was great working with the technical staff within Sun. Still some of the best and brightest. To bad they had no one to run the company for them.
How could management ignore the input of the teams and the signs of the market for so many years, quarter after quarter? Was it incompetence, too much trust in the wrong people, convenience or simply bad luck? Perhaps a bit of everything. Thing is that some managers in key positions weren’t and still are not able to manage people and complexity after all. We all try to get the personal best, but more introspection, self-assessment and personal honesty would make professional life easier for all parties. More meritocracy and less favoritism could be the key.
Sorry for saying so but all of you are wrong. The seeds of Sun’s demise were sown in the 90s. Sun’s ultimate demise began when the customers realized that with Linux on Intel hardware they could get almost all the capability they needed for about a fifth of the cost. When the excesses of the Dotcom boom ended and $ were a premium Sun could not compete.
But the real mistake was done about 5 years earlier when Sun abandoned (or really never allowed to start) the idea of spinning out an independent operating system company based on Solaris. This was never seriously considered but it was advocated by those of us in SunSoft. Had Sun done this it is very likely Linux would have never gotten the traction it did and Solaris would have become the alternative operating system of choice. With a Variety of expensive and cheap hardware to run on it would have become a successful alternative to Windows. Sun hardware may have suffered some, but Sun or SunSoft would have become a powerful and successful entity. Sun was unfortunately blinded by Java (thinking that was more important then Solaris), the booming economy for their hardware and their arrogance in believing Linux was just a toy OS. By 2001 it was too late, the dye had been cast and there would be no recovery just a long agonizing decline. By the time Sun tried to claim to do Intel, and Linux and “kinda” open Solaris it was too late, they were just some Jonny come lately to this world and who needed another intel/Linux vendor. HP and IBM were well established with intel and Linux and much more diversified so in a much better position to take advantage of this shift in the market. Sun was left to try and justify why a customer should pay their exorbitant prices with out any real place to turn. The weak management was just another symptom of this malignant disease that could not be cured.
Which brought us to here. I’m not entirely surprised Oracle bought Sun, but not for the hardware, but for Solaris. Years ago my colleagues and I use to speculate that a clever acquisition deal would be for Oracle and Fujtsu to partner and acquire Sun, with Oracle taking the OS (thus giving them a complete stack of platform and applications to compete with Microsoft in the enterprise) and Fujitsu taking the hardware – given their commitment to SPARC. That deal would have made sense. I don’t know about this whole deal for Oracle, but maybe just the benefit of getting their hands on Solaris and to a lesser degree Java serves the same purpose. Its sad to see the demise of Sun, it was a wonderful place to work but I have been gone a long time. The lesson to learn is, this is our industry (DataGeneral, Prime, DEC, Compaq, SGI (that one was ugly) …Sun…who’s next)
I would say that Sun’s downslide began in 1999, when they
began a de facto policy of not hiring any US citizens for
technical jobs. The inundation of low-cost H1-B programmers
was a disaster for the ordinary people in the technology
industry, and we have not forgotten how Sun’s lobbyists
published statements about how there is a “shortage” of
Computer Engineers even as thousands of people with
BS and MS degrees from top US schools were forced to
leave California due to the high level of discrimination
against US citizens. A lot of people were rooting for
Sun to go down the tubes, because of their crooked
hiring practices, especially H1-B and TN-1.
It was not exactly instant karma, but still.
I hope that the people at Sun who were responsible
for the H1-B policy are all laid off, and I hope that
they stay unemployed for the next 8-10 years.
@Bolt : Thanks, that’s the best laugh I have had all day.