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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!