We have the whole Oxide team coming to Emeryville this week for our annual OxCon meetup. For a remote company, an in-person meeting is uniquely energizing, and in preparation for that, we made some t-shirts featuring Oxide logos that are an homage to past computer companies.
Thanks to our designer extraordinaire, Ben Leonard, all of these homage shirts are amazing — but one of them was simply too hot to leave as a surprise:
Unsurprisingly, this shirt has stirred up a bunch of nostalgia for Sun. Much of the fondness for Sun has been earned: Oxide’s mission comes directly from Scott McNealy’s epitaph for Sun — and Scott’s reflection that over 28 years he "never had to hide the newspaper in shame from my children" remains words that all companies should live by.
But the nostalgia can also become suffocating — to the point where folks that post-date Sun may reasonably demand to hear what Sun did wrong. And of course, Sun did plenty wrong; while I was never ashamed to work for Sun, I was not infrequently embarrassed by the stuff we screwed up.
Every Sun employee will have their own perspective on what Sun got wrong, and I talked about my own view in a Hacker News comment in 2011. I stand by that analysis, but another 15 years on (!), I would probably distill things even further: Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.
Sun’s disinterest is embodied in an episode from 2005, when a startup that was running its infrastructure on OpenSolaris was looking to buy Sun gear. This is — or should have been — a vindication of Sun making Solaris open source: the startup was growing like a weed, pioneering what we would later call cloud computing. The startup was using Sun’s software, and wanted to buy a ton of Sun hardware; the model worked!
Except, it didn’t. The customer could not get Sun to pick up the phone. (And when Sun did pick up the phone, they tried to sell them the wrong product.) This was in sharp contrast to their experience with Dell: the startup filled out a web form in the middle of the night, and the next morning…
…the phone rings, it’s Steve the local Dell account executive, and thus began the process where we all came under the impression that Steve actually worked for us. In less than 2 weeks we had some chances to “pitch” the company to get into a certain pricing tier, had all the servers in the datacenter, and had managed to get it all leased based purely on the company’s financials (no personal guarantees). And honestly, 95% of all of the work was done by Steve. I felt like a Big Company. I felt like Steve worked for me.
I remember (vividly!) where I was when I read that blog entry: we had just started Fishworks, and we were squatting in a corner of some abandoned Sun office space while awaiting a more permanent home in San Francisco. My heart sank as I read it, in part because it represented so much strategic success, and yet was ultimately a story of operational failure. I remember thinking that a company that has become bored with the mechanics of running a business cannot succeed — no matter how successful its strategy might otherwise be.
Sun continued for a few more years, and we tried like hell to right the ship, but it wasn’t enough; Sun didn’t make it.
For those outside of Sun, our homage to Sun (and to other defunct computer companies!) may seem purely nostalgic, but to us, it’s something deeper: we admire these companies for the important things that they got right, but we study them to learn what they got wrong. We honor them best by learning from both — to be at once inspired and warned!