Sun Microsystems was a high flying technology company for much of the 80s, 90s, and even early into the 21st century. But they fell fast and they fell hard. Although they were not a dotcom company, having had their IPO on March 4, 1986, the dotcom bust mortally wounded Sun. The result of that was on January 27, 2010, Oracle acquired Sun for $7.4 billion. And slowly but surely, Oracle is retiring parts of that Sun legacy.
My experience with Sun Microsystems
My dad asked me what I knew about Sun sometime in the late 80s. It was a high flying stock and that made him curious, but all I knew about Sun computers was that they ran something called Unix. And that didn’t help him very much.
My next encounter with Sun was in college in the mid 90s. The student computer labs had NeXT and SGI workstations in them, but some of the computer science professors had Sun workstations in their offices.
In 2005, I took a job at my local cable company/ISP. They were mostly owned by Paul Allen, so they used a lot of Microsoft technology. But when Microsoft wouldn’t do, they used Sun. I occasionally had to log into a Sun box to do random system administration tasks. That job didn’t last all that long but I soon landed in the government contracting world. My contract was responsible for running two systems. The legacy system ran on Sun. The replacement ran on Windows. I rarely touched the legacy systems but I walked past them every day. The Sun hardware was more robust than the Dell hardware the new system ran on. It was also a lot more expensive. Our solution was more redundancy. It was clear even in 2005 that the future was less expensive systems that could fail over rapidly and gracefully.
How the dotcom boom affected Sun Microsystems
1986 was a good year for tech stocks. Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, and Silicon Graphics all went public that year.
And Sun was a well established company by the late 1990s. But they were tied up in the dotcom boom largely because their hardware powered so much of it. Running your dotcom on Windows was trendy, but frankly, people took you more seriously if you ran at least the Internet-facing part of it on Sun. The hardware was fast and reliable and the operating system, Solaris, was reliable and well understood.
The dotcom boom was good for Sun, causing massive increases in revenue. The problem was Sun expanded as if the dotcom boom wasn’t ever going to end. When dotcoms started going bust soon after Y2K, it hurt almost every technology company, but it seemed to hurt Sun and Compaq more than most.
In December 2002, Sun’s stock bottomed out at $10 per share, a mere 10 percent of what it had been worth in 1990, and a paltry four percent of its peak value.
Failed attempts to recover from the dotcom bust
Its share price in shambles, Sun went into cost reduction mode, closing facilities, consolidating manufacturing, and cancelling projects. But nothing they did was quite enough. Sun had profitable quarters in 2005 and 2007, but lost $1.68 billion in the first quarter of 2008. Sun’s stock again fell, losing 80% of its value between November 2007 and November 2008.
And on April 20, 2009, Sun agreed to be acquired by Oracle Corporation, the maker of database software. Oracle’s database ran very well on Solaris and Sun hardware, and Oracle bet being able to sell the full stack would appeal to its largest customers. That lasted about 7 years. In September 2017, Oracle laid off most of the Solaris team and most of the SPARC team. The most prominent former Sun technology at Oracle now is Java.
Sun is an example of how the AI phenomenon could potentially affect technology companies that we don’t directly associate with AI.
In 2013, Facebook moved into the old Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park. Facebook left a faded old Sun logo intact on the back of its street-facing sign as a reminder that success is fleeting.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Around the 2002 time-frame when I was entering the work force with a “real” job. We used HP Unix and Sun systems for all the serious work but things like email and admin tasks were largely performed on Windows machines. This slowly shifted over the years I was there. By the time I left, my workstation was no longer HP Unix with the beautiful CDE workspace.
Just a thought, tho, Sun’s lasting benefits are still felt today. Network File System (NFS) is something that I use all the time, Java, love it or hate it is still widely used and developed. I do wish they were still a thing as more players in the tech space, the better. I am not a fan of the monoliths.
What happened to Be OS?
could linux replacing Be OS?
I was a Solaris sysadmin from SunOS 4.1.3 until about 10 years ago. All that stuff is on Linux now, which means cheaper hardware and orders of magnitude package management. Good enough x64 hardware and cheap comparable operating system with wide software support really did Sun in.
The only Solaris boxes I have now are a couple of ZFS appliances, which run Solaris underneath but I don’t ever drop to the command line unless something is very very wrong.
is Illumos any good vs. linux?