I don't know Bryan personally -I wish I did-, but I am pretty sure he's hard to crush. There's always something else to do.
Many of us Solaris Engineering refugees have gone on to do other things. And trust me, for me it was hard and still is because I don't yet get to use the new Linux eBPF stuff daily and w/o privilege for the equivalent of DTrace USDT, and I also don't get to use ZoL, and because systemd is a very poor not-SMF, and because there is no FMA for Linux, and because epoll makes me sad, and so on and on. But I don't dwell on all the mistakes made by Sun's executives from 2000-2010 (and they made so many terrible mistakes), not often. Since that seems popular in this thread, I'll tell you what I think those mistakes were (some of which Oracle is still making):
- clinging to dying business (SPARC, J2ME) to the
point that other, better business was forgone to
avoid cannibalizing / competing with the dying
business
- killing Sun PS (2002)
- insisting on unacceptable-to-Google licensing
terms for Solaris (2002)
- suspending Solaris x86 development (2002)
- selling Sun to Oracle
There are more bad decisions, including buying MySQL (which was instantly forked, and that US$1bn price tag hurt).
Oddly, the torch of OS innovation has passed to MSFT. Not so odd, really, when you realize that MSFT learned the lessons of stack ranking (don't do it). And MSFT already had learned the lesson that to survive disruptions you must pivot. Bryan clearly learned those lessons early, so I think he'll be fine.
Apart from this entry I don't see any discussion on what Sun did wrong, but since you broached the subject:
- I'm furious about all the attention RISC V undeservedly gets while OpenSPARC is vastly superior in terms of mnemonics and virtual register windows and a free instruction every branch not taken and is GPL licensed;
- not devoting enough attention to i86pc Solaris was a major mistake;
- not selling cheap fully Solaris integrated desktops was the death knell: people knew Solaris from their student days, and universities had it because Sun made and sold workstations; once Sun decided to stop that, talent acquisition was stopped: desktop is needed for OS adoption;
- UltraSPARC T3 and T5 are blazingly fast, I know because I ran them, but now it seems too late;
- it wouldn't be too late if the RISC V nonsense pandering stopped and some OpenSPARC designed servers and workstations and even tinkertoys showed up by enthusiasts, like they did with Raspberry Pi;
- I'm glad Sun bought MySQL because Oracle subsequently destroyed it; MySQL is nowhere to be found now, and that is good so, because it was a shitty database which silently corrupts data; it deserved never to be made in the first place; that is one good deed in the world of damage which Oracle caused;
- killing OpenSolaris destroyed all that good will; had the project continued, it would have directly competed with GNU/Linux because we saw a constant monthly influx of GNU/Linux refugees on opensolaris.org forum, people who actually needed to get things done with their hardware;
- biggest mistake was that UltraSPARC based servers weren't cheaper than an average intel personal computer tin bucket server. That really killed them. And they would argue and refer me, a customer, to their internal "pricing committee" instead of listening.
What happens when a business doesn't listen to its customers?
"Bryan clearly learned those lessons early, so I think he'll be fine."
Indeed, and I wish him well and much success. He truly deserves by his deeds let alone his thoughts to continue being successful.
Eh, killing OpenSolaris was done by Oracle. While that was a side-effect of Oracle acquiring Sun, it's still on Oracle, so I won't apportion blame for that one on Sun execs.
The death of MySQL is certainly a good thing, but it's not really dead. People use it still.
SPARC was a dead end.
I too wish Bryan well. And the rest of the Sun diaspora. I miss them!
Many of us Solaris Engineering refugees have gone on to do other things. And trust me, for me it was hard and still is because I don't yet get to use the new Linux eBPF stuff daily and w/o privilege for the equivalent of DTrace USDT, and I also don't get to use ZoL, and because systemd is a very poor not-SMF, and because there is no FMA for Linux, and because epoll makes me sad, and so on and on. But I don't dwell on all the mistakes made by Sun's executives from 2000-2010 (and they made so many terrible mistakes), not often. Since that seems popular in this thread, I'll tell you what I think those mistakes were (some of which Oracle is still making):
There are more bad decisions, including buying MySQL (which was instantly forked, and that US$1bn price tag hurt).Oddly, the torch of OS innovation has passed to MSFT. Not so odd, really, when you realize that MSFT learned the lessons of stack ranking (don't do it). And MSFT already had learned the lesson that to survive disruptions you must pivot. Bryan clearly learned those lessons early, so I think he'll be fine.