Re: Blockchain

On 06/30/2018 07:18 AM, Karen Shaeffer wrote:
> And the crash of Sun Microsystems also correlated with the dot-com bust
> in 2000. IMHO, this market shock changed the linux adoption curve
> trajectory within the business community dramatically accelerating the
> business adoption rate of linux at the expense of Sun. Furthermore it
> was the early support of linux by IBM and Intel along with Google's use
> case that set the stage for this meteoric rise of linux. Just thinking
> out loud.

Sun Micro's demise was not simply correlated with the Dot-Com bust.  It 
was caused by it.

Sun made many missteps in 2001, 2002, and later, as it's stock price 
followed the downside of its parabolic rise and descent.  (I left Sun 
before the bust with a pocket full of stock which had gone through 
multiple splits.  Unfortunately, I didn't bale out until the stock lost 
80+% of its peak value.  If this had been a flight on the same curve as 
the SUNW stock price, that would have been me in the back screaming 
"pull up, pull up!")

Sun had a moth-like approach-avoidance relationship with Open Source. 
They released OpenSolaris in 2005 (as with most Sun things post-2000, 
this was too little, too late).  OpenSolaris was an in-house project 
with outside contributors.  Developer contributions were to support 
Sun's proprietary product.  Linux, in contrast, was an outside project 
with in-house (e.g., IBM, RedHat) contributors.  Developer contributions 
supported everyone's products.

Sun's Solaris could have given Linux much more competition than it did 
(at the time, Solaris was technically much more advanced than Linux). 
As far as I know, Sun didn't actively discourage other companies from 
productizing Solaris, like IBM was doing with Linux, but I think that 
Sun's attitude was "why should we do anything which will support our 
competitors?"  IBM was never going to sign up to support Solaris.  (One 
can see that in the name chosen for IBM's IDE product, Eclipse.)

-- 
Michael Eager    [email protected]
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306