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What Sun got wrong
Hraness cites a source capture. The source author remains the source.
gist
Bryan Cantrill marks Oxide's OxCon Sun homage by answering what Sun got wrong: it grew bored with the mechanics of running a business. A 2005 OpenSolaris customer wanted to buy Sun hardware for early cloud work and could not get Sun sales to help, while Dell's Steve answered overnight and filled the racks in two weeks. Cantrill later joined that startup (Joyent), hired Steve, and co-founded Oxide with him—honoring past computer companies by learning from both their wins and their operational failures.
ideas
- Strategy without ops still fails. Open-sourcing Solaris and attracting a growing cloud pioneer was strategic success; refusing to sell them hardware made it operational failure.
- Boredom with business is the distilled diagnosis. Fifteen years after his 2011 HN comment, Cantrill compresses Sun's mistakes to disinterest in the mechanics of running a company.
- Responsive sales beat brand nostalgia. Dell's Steve treated the startup like his employer; Sun either did not answer or pitched the wrong product.
- Hire the people who out-operated you. Cantrill left Sun for the startup Sun ignored, then co-founded Oxide with the Dell account executive who had closed the deal.
- Homage is study, not pure nostalgia. Oxide's Sun shirt honors what past computer companies got right while warning against repeating what they got wrong.
quotes
“Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.”
“The customer could not get Sun to pick up the phone.”
“I felt like a Big Company. I felt like Steve worked for me.”
“we admire these companies for the important things that they got right, but we study them to learn what they got wrong.”