* they sold SUN/Solaris servers, until the market started preferring cheap x86 stations with Linux installed
* while their moto was "the network is the computer" since before anyone saw that, they failed to ride the cloud ... it happens with companies way before their time
* they had a great start with Java applets but they weren't a company of creatives, like Macromedia/Adobe, and so they missed this opportunity
* Eclipse and the whole open-source community around Java practically took away their ability to sell any Java related tools
Open-sourcing Java was a good decision ... it was out of their control anyway. Open-sourcing Solaris was also a rational decision ... who would've used Solaris when Linux gives you almost everything Solaris does, and for free too?
Open-sourcing Netbeans was the only way to compete with Eclipse ... look at IntelliJ ... even they decided it's not in their interest to keep the core closed.
What they failed to do is to monetize these freebies with complementary commercial products. JavaFX is free? Cool ... why not sell a tool for designers that competes with the Adobe Flash environment?
Solaris is free? Cool ... sell kick-ass development / management tools that are only available for Solaris.
They also had the resources to pull something like Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine ... based on Solaris, Java and MySql. I wouldn've liked that, but they didn't
Instead their bet was on support contracts. But big enterprises that go for this are going with IBM instead, which has a lot more resources. And small companies prefer to get their support from free online help channels, like IRC/mailing-lists.
"* they sold SUN/Solaris servers, until the market started preferring cheap x86 stations with Linux installed"
They were late to the cheap-desktop-running-linux party, but they could, arguably, build inexpensive desktops had they given up the idea of building desktops as if they were tanks. I bet they could build SPARC servers at Dell prices, if they wanted to have Dell quality.
"* they had a great start with Java applets but they weren't a company of creatives, like Macromedia/Adobe, and so they missed this opportunity"
To be fair, Macromedia bought a small startup FutureWave. Adobe bought Macromedia. Microsoft embedded Flash in every copy of Windows and rode it's monopoly to it's own.
"* Eclipse and the whole open-source community around Java practically took away their ability to sell any Java related tools"
Still, their C++ IDE is top-notch.
Open-sourcing Solaris may help fragment the Unix market and help drive it towards standards (as opposed to Linux being the de-facto standard)
JavaFX is free because nobody would buy it anyway. Network effects make Flash's stronghold nearly unassailable. Even Microsoft is having trouble with it.
"They also had the resources to pull something like Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine ... based on Solaris, Java and MySql. I wouldn've liked that, but they didn't"
Like the Sun Cloud Compute Utility?
And buying MySQL was downright stupid. In more civilized societies a CEO who pulls a stunt like this would be in prison.
> They also had the resources to pull something like Amazon's EC2
I think they tried - if you look up Schwartz's blog from a couple of years ago, he was making the argument that you should buy computing power like you buy electric power ("Chief Electricity Officer", I think he said ;-).
They were using older grid technologies. Instead of a VM, you put in a terribly-documented job-script thing that was sorta like a shell script but had extra stuff you needed in there. I spent weeks trying to make it work, and got nowhere. Took me maybe 3 hours to setup in EC2.
It's what happens when management falls so much in love with the idea that they never touch the execution.
* they sold SUN/Solaris servers, until the market started preferring cheap x86 stations with Linux installed
* while their moto was "the network is the computer" since before anyone saw that, they failed to ride the cloud ... it happens with companies way before their time
* they had a great start with Java applets but they weren't a company of creatives, like Macromedia/Adobe, and so they missed this opportunity
* Eclipse and the whole open-source community around Java practically took away their ability to sell any Java related tools
Open-sourcing Java was a good decision ... it was out of their control anyway. Open-sourcing Solaris was also a rational decision ... who would've used Solaris when Linux gives you almost everything Solaris does, and for free too?
Open-sourcing Netbeans was the only way to compete with Eclipse ... look at IntelliJ ... even they decided it's not in their interest to keep the core closed.
What they failed to do is to monetize these freebies with complementary commercial products. JavaFX is free? Cool ... why not sell a tool for designers that competes with the Adobe Flash environment?
Solaris is free? Cool ... sell kick-ass development / management tools that are only available for Solaris.
They also had the resources to pull something like Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine ... based on Solaris, Java and MySql. I wouldn've liked that, but they didn't
Instead their bet was on support contracts. But big enterprises that go for this are going with IBM instead, which has a lot more resources. And small companies prefer to get their support from free online help channels, like IRC/mailing-lists.