Solaris got disrupted by Linux, and their hardware was disrupted by Intel machines. When Linux on x86 is working well, there's little reason to shell out money for Solaris on SPARC.
They had Java but that's also challenging to monetize. When it was introduced it was novel to have a portable C-like workhorse that has GC and bounds checking, but now there are many free options for that.
> They had Java but that's also challenging to monetize.
Apple killed J2ME with the iPhone.
Every success story Sun had was defeated by others. SPARC by Intel, Solaris by Linux (really, Google), and Java by the iPhone. Ditto for smaller products like Sun Directory Service.
I worked at several x86 Linux + SPARC Solaris shops between 1999 and say 2011. Linux was always on the app servers, and Solaris on the DB servers.
The Sun hardware was just better, more robust, and the machines tended to have hot-swappable bits. Better support for fast storage. Hot-plug in Linux was bad and took time to get good. The hardware was cheap, and took time to get good. Ditto driver support. It just got better and better until there was no reason to buy Sun.
And then Oracle bought Sun, and there was now a reason to _avoid_ Sun.
In the PNW, eskimo.com was using Sun machines at least in 1994 when I joined, and I assume for some years earlier. Oz.net was using Irix on SGI machines :)
That stuff was surely popular, too! But we were running LAMP stacks in the late 90s to host customer content on cheap x86 boxes, and it that was an enormously popular hosting solution for many years before 2005.
Sun boxes were very nice machines, but an entry level Sun Fire V480 debuted for $20K, and that would buy a whole tabletop of x86 servers in tower cases.
There was a much greater variety of plausible server options back then, to be sure. I'm mainly arguing against the idea that Linux+x86 was useless until 2005 or so. I had personally worked in 5 different ISP/hosting companies by then which all used that exact combination.
Oh, absolutely, fair point. I used linux exclusively on the desktop from 95-02.
Even commercially; I worked at a decent-sized digital services company in 99-02 that, from the day I started, had 2 ALR 6x6 pentium pro machines as database servers (6 proc, 6 hot swap drive bays). When they crashed, our main issues were with really long-running `fsck` because journaling filesystems were not a thing.
All the app servers were white label intel boxes. We had issues, sure -- the one that comes to mind chiefly is that we were doing IP-based virtual hosting (I don't think name-based virtual hosting was a thing yet), and Linux seemed to get unstable and randomly drop the virtual interfaces once you exceeded maybe a few hundred per NIC, and you'd have to restart the i/f to fix it. I don't think these were behind LBs yet, but I can't really remember.
All that stuff was on RedHat, the first time of 2 or 3 times that Redhat went through the v7 -> v8 -> v9 period :)
Even in much later years (eg, 2008-ish), I remember that too many vendors (HP, Dell, etc) would ship these prosumer grade RAID cards that absolutely fell over (locked up) at sustained high util %. You could (probably correctly) argue that was because we didn't pony up for the true high-end x86 hardware, but the fact that enterprise server companies shipped this stuff at all meant it made the x86 option look less robust compared to the big iron.
> When Linux on x86 is working well, there's little reason to shell out money for Solaris on SPARC
They still had the high-end gear. I remember SPARC boxes with more than 60 sockets and mainframe-like partitions (and mainframe-like availability). And, if you wanted to develop for those, it’d make sense to buy a SPARC workstation running the same OS.
Sun could be in the same niche IBM carved for itself in the POWER and mainframe space, but while IBM continued investing in POWER and Z, Oracle shut down SPARC development.
It seems most things in tech (OS's, databases, languages, etc) eventually become a race to zero unless you can provide some long-term service-level support for it the way most cloud computing vendors have.
Sun should have probably bought Joyent and gotten their rather huge corporate client base (financial institutions, etc) onto it, but even then it was probably too little too late.
I'm getting into the history of Palm who seemed to be the pass around project for 20 years before hp burnt it to the ground. Are there any good books or something about the full history? Feels like all of these companies are woven together like a bowl of spaghetti...sun, oracle, google, apple, etc
Free and open source software commoditised almost every sliver of the market. A lot of the investment in cloud and AI is to recapture some margins by using access to training materials and high capital investments as entry barriers.
They had Java but that's also challenging to monetize. When it was introduced it was novel to have a portable C-like workhorse that has GC and bounds checking, but now there are many free options for that.