Simon Phipps comments on Oracle’s decision to close down the SPARC and Solaris business units. He  was close to the politics of Sun’s “Dash to Open” in the mid noughties. My feeling is that Sun had failed before Schwartz was appointed; there was no longer room for differentiated hardware company; Oracle’s failure to monetise the SPARC product line may have been caused by management hubris, but the long term economics of microprocessors and the establishment of distributed & collaborative software technology was more important. Sun were late to adopt Plan 9 and making Solaris, an SMP/UMA big iron solution was a cul-de-sac it couldn’t escape from. If you agree with me then the purchase of the Cray systems that became the E10K aka Starfire was the mistake that led to failure. Who’d have guessed?

I had promised not to write about Sun’s failure, but I think I am better now. I ought to be it’s along time ago.

Best of luck to those who’ll lose their jobs, I’m sure they’ll find work soon though.

Sunset, finally?
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One thought on “Sunset, finally?

  • 19th March 2018 at 10:02 pm
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    This at the Economist is quite interesting, itemising that Nvidia wins through chip multi-threading and that AI is driving Papadopolous’s Red Shift architectures because Moore’s Law is or has run out of steam. The article raises the question were Sun’s management just crap!

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