Re: Blockchain

On 06/30/2018 09:21 AM, Karen Shaeffer wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 30, 2018 at 09:06:50AM -0700, Michael Eager wrote:

>> Sun's Solaris could have given Linux much more competition than it did
>> (at the time, Solaris was technically much more advanced than Linux).
> 
> During the emergence of the dot-com bust, I was doing linux systems
> engineering work at startups. One of my routine tasks was performance
> analysis comparing the performance of application stacks running on
> intel-linux versus sun-solaris. In a price-performance comparison,
> linux-intel was an order of magnitude more competitive than sun-solaris
> was in the context of comparable hardware scale. Sure, sun-solaris was
> an awesome example of highly optimized hw-OS at scale. And at scale this
> meant huge extremely expensive sun systems. But the market had turned to
> using low-end, COTS linux-intel systems in server farms. And Sun's low
> end solaris systems were not highly optimized. Quite the opposite. These
> low end intel-linux HW-OS systems were so much more cost effective than
> sun's solution it was a no brainer for companies to adopt intel COTS hw
> running linux. And this led to the fall of Sun Microsystems IMHO.

Sun could have made Solaris much more competitive on Intel/AMD hardware. 
  (Sun released AMD/Solaris systems in the mid-2000s.  That, like other 
Sun actions, might have been too little, too late.)  Of course, 
improving x86 performance might have enabled companies to sell lower 
cost X86 systems running Solaris, which might cut into sales of 
Sparc/Solaris systems.

X86/Linux didn't kill Sun so much as Sun killed Sun.  Sun focused on 
big system sales and abandoned the desktop and small server market. 
Meanwhile, Linux added features which were previously found in Solaris, 
such as SMP support and more robust file systems.  Incrementally, small 
x86 systems became large x86 systems.  Sun squeezed themselves into a 
shrinking high-end market segment.

Much of this started before the Dot Com Bust.  But during the Dot Com 
Bubble, with server sales going through the roof, ceding the low end 
market to x86/Linux didn't seem to have a downside.

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