Yet another Hacker News

117 points chmaynard 1 hour ago 52 comments

coreyh14444 1 hour ago | parent

As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.

sschueller 47 minutes ago | parent

For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates. Instead I can for example go to Thomas Kren and configure my serves online for a fraction of the cost. They have what they list in stock, delivered a few weeks later. Everything is clear and hasle free.

At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.

bombcar 27 minutes ago | parent

That’s exactly what enterprise sales is. Call for pricing, tell the absolute upper limit you can spend, and pay.

thevillagechief 26 minutes ago | parent

I think this is a case of AI ruining the hardware market. We used to almost exclusively use Dell, but now we've been forced to look elsewhere and go through validating new vendors. The lead-times are ridiculous, and these guys now only pay attention to the really big guys. Not sure I can blame them though, you've gotta do what's best for your business.

ganoushoreilly 22 minutes ago | parent

Dell was very much moving this way before modern AI explosion. The inconsistency on pricing alone depending on what rep was helping you also became a problem. I could often times call in direct and order via business line cheaper than dealing with my account rep. No reason to jump through so many hoops.

I prefer the "This is the price" model and just make it consistent. I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general.

Just let me buy it and move on.

dabraham1248 10 minutes ago | parent

> I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general.

Based on how things are moving, I think it's more likely that AI will _replace_ the layers of middle men (with layers of "middle AI"), then that those layers will be _removed_.

jmclnx 40 minutes ago | parent

And that is the "thing". Every failed mini company had the same exact issue, seems customers had to beg and/or go through hell to purchase equipment. Never mind that the hardware was more expensive than what you cold buy from companies like Dell.

IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.

fidotron 25 minutes ago | parent

Sun commercial sales reps, at least in Europe, were astoundingly slimy.

I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed.

So when we could move to Dell we did.

arethuza 23 minutes ago | parent

I'm sure I have a memory of someone at Sun UK telling me about how they managed to run up a £30K bar bill at an event....

fidotron 10 minutes ago | parent

Yeah that fits. I was in London (though not the City) and it was definitely that sort of scene.

Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards.

What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.

cmdrk 58 minutes ago | parent

when I was a student in the waning days of Sun, the SPARC/Solaris machines were impenetrable Big Iron guarded closely by the greybeards -- not to be touched by the likes of mere undergrads. Never really did get beyond noodling around with cast off gear from eBay, though I did get to enjoy a bit of it via the Sun DNA in SmartOS years later.

PaulHoule 50 minutes ago | parent

Our Sun rep served us well at an academic library. I had no problems provisioning a server with a nice storage array. When things fell apart at Sun our sales engineer from Sun wound up working for us.

strappymcneeler 57 minutes ago | parent

Solaris lack of a package manager and crappy patches where patches replaced things wholesale, caused us a lot of overtime, but hey, got me a bigger house! Thanks Sun! Oh btw their hardware was way ahead of their shit software, which wasn’t as bad as shittier IBM or Digital or HP

dijit 45 minutes ago | parent

I still feel like we're catching up to SMF.

But yeah, the lack of package manager hurt a lot, and there were competing third-party package managers which had totally different pro's/con's and packages and were incompatible with each other... what a mess.

Compared to apt/yum it was kinda comical... but the first party software really was excellent otherwise.

jacquesm 29 minutes ago | parent

Yes. The software really wasn't all that great. I played a lot with Sun gear and had SGI stuff as well, the polish of the SGI machines vs the 1980's vibe that the Sun gear gave off was on a completely different level. Sun was quality hardware but the software was really a time capsule of what Unix workstations had looked like in the past.

justin66 53 minutes ago | parent

Having read a lot of these things from ex-Sun employees, I dearly want to read one with the topic my department is the one that fucked up Sun. I don't think I have seen a topic like that yet.

bcantrill 34 minutes ago | parent

I actually haven't read a ton of these, so would love to be pointed to what you have found. But yes, everyone will be biased, and I am too. I think that the organization that I was in fucked up plenty (when I joined the company in 1996, SunSoft was led by truly one of the most incompetent executives I have ever encountered, a bumbling oaf that Sun kept putting in charge of different business units, letting him asphyxiate them one by one), but the fact that everyone also sees something else wrong probably tells you a few things: everyone at Sun earnestly wanted the company to succeed; Sun did a bunch of stuff right; Sun did a bunch of other stuff wrong.

Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome -- and I think it's pretty telling that Sun's executive leadership basically went on to do more or less nothing after Sun. I loved Sun -- but it was a breeding ground for engineers, not executive leadership.

jhbadger 30 minutes ago | parent

I seriously don't know what Sun could have done to survive - once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.

bluGill 13 minutes ago | parent

They should have seen commodity hardware coming and built cheaper hardware themselves. They could have. Other companies were making clone Spark machines for much less so it would have been possible.

icedchai 10 minutes ago | parent

Early Linux distros were very rough. Remember messing around with modelines in X11 configs?

Sun could've been the "Apple" of x86 Unix: it just works.

bluGill 29 minutes ago | parent

That doesn't exist. No department is every completely at fault. No department has enough budget to sink a company alone. It is always a lot of departments that don't turn in expected results - often for reasons not in their control.

The fault is always upper management not doing their job. Even if one department really would be that bad (which again they are not), upper management allowed them to be that bad.

grahamlee 50 minutes ago | parent

The Sun model of beefy server, ultra-thin client worked incredibly well and presaged the widespread adoption of virtualisation that eventually led to cloud computing and containerised software. Unfortunately that model made it very easy to undercut their prices using commodity hardware; I managed a Solaris/Sun Ray network c.2004 and it was cheaper to switch to Linux/Intel and buy spare hardware to keep in a cupboard “just in case” than to keep the Sun network going through its support contract.

dijit 49 minutes ago | parent

it is often cheaper to buy a spare of something and throw it in a cupboard rather than have a support contract.

I have a bunch of Aruba switches and this is what we do, because it's a lot cheaper.

bluGill 34 minutes ago | parent

If you are only buying a single spare that is the case. Support contracts make sense when you would want several dozen spares.

dijit 23 minutes ago | parent

if a support contract is 70% of the cost of something, then for every 2 of something a spare is cheaper.

For Aruba I think it was 1:1; a support contract was the same price as the device itself over 2 years or something.

Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices, so your cost scales with the amount you have... so I'm not sure I follow what you're saying..

Unless you mean to imply that you're replacing units more than once every 2 years, in which case of course you're right... but then I might consider going with another vendor entirely because that is a pretty terrible reliability record.

bluGill 18 minutes ago | parent

There are lots of different support contracts. Some of them really do cover the entire site. You seem to not realize the scale of a large data center. If every device lasts 5 years you are replacing 10 per day is not unheard of.

miohtama 44 minutes ago | parent

Java applets!

alpineman 44 minutes ago | parent

Is this how the whole LLM thing will go down once providers raise prices?

bluGill 35 minutes ago | parent

Maybe - ask me in 20 years...

Nobody knows how the future will be. There are lots of options. There are self hostable open models today - they are not as good, but some report they are good enough. Right now I don't have the hardware to try them (I could - if I'm willing to accept a small number of tokens per minute - useful means more tokens per second as I can get in an hour). However I expect in a few years I'll be able buy consumer hardware with good enough GPUs (or perhaps an AI chip???). Will anyone other than a few hobbyists buy them? time will tell.

titzer 36 minutes ago | parent

I worked at Sun labs and used a Sun Ray daily for a whole summer. It worked...OK. Definitely not "Incredibly well". We had a network of a few hundred Sun Rays and two E10Ks backing it. More than a million for the servers and $1000k a piece for the Sun Rays was not cheap. Basically any $1000 laptop was more powerful, without the need for a crazy powerful Sun server. The experience of taking out my ID card, walking down the hall to another cubicle and popping it in and getting my session was magical. But I did that less than once a week, so I don't think it was overall worth it. The Sun Rays also had a pretty crappy LCD, about 1-2 years behind the SoTA.

It was a cool idea. It will keep coming back again and again. But at Sun's price points around the early 2000s, it was a loser, and I actually agree with the market in this instance. Sun Ray was a flop.

arethuza 32 minutes ago | parent

"It will keep coming back again and again."

It lived on in the world of Windows Terminal Services and things like Citrix - maybe still does in some places.

steve1977 19 minutes ago | parent

It lives on in the world of LLMs in a way.

pjmlp 33 minutes ago | parent

Remember, "The Network is the Computer".

Which is why it is kind of ironic having folks discussing microservices as something groundbreaking.

ChrisArchitect 41 minutes ago | parent

Love that t-shirt. Does it have the Meta logo on the back of it? /s

titzer 40 minutes ago | parent

I interned for Sun and then worked as an MTS in Sun Labs for a couple of years. I miss Sun; I think they were very much an engineer's company that was spoiled by two things: big success in the early workstation market, and the dumb luck of the dot com boom. Sun hardware was solid (even though they fell behind the curve because of mismanagement of a couple of CPU lines), and its kernel (Solaris) was one of the well-engineered kernels ever. While any business makes some bad business decisions from time to time, one thing that was fatal was a crippling enterprise focus that failed to understand the huge growth opportunity that OSS and Linux represented. It was growth in a direction they not only didn't understand, but refused to understand, study, or adapt to.

Sun's heyday was in the boom. The fish were jumping in the boat. So naturally they were building bigger and bigger boats.

There was always the one-off ideas that might have gone here or there, but that core server cow just seemed like an endless source of cash. Thus they neglected the workstation market and ironically, the market for anything bigger than one single server rack. They didn't understand horizontal scaling, and the rise of cheap-but-replaceable consumer hardware like how Google did things was alien to them. They poo-poo'ed Linux, they killed and then unkilled Solaris x86, and a number of other things.

I do miss Sun though. As far as engineering goes, they were a very serious company full of serious engineers. Basically the polar opposite of 10X tech bros and startup culture.

bcantrill 26 minutes ago | parent

Oof, the killing and subsequent unkilling of Solaris x86 in 2002 brings back very bad memories -- Sun management at its worst. It also highlighted the relative power of Sun's engineering in that everyone in Solaris knew it was the wrong decision, and we more or less disobeyed orders: during that period (January 2002 to August 2002, when it was reversed), we didn't change our treatment of x86. (And in particular, breaking x86 was grounds for a putback to be backed out.)

When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.

lokar 12 minutes ago | parent

I worked at sun (sunsoft) right out of school near the peak. It was great. I was very excited to have all of the sources for sunos easily available to read.

Later, in grad school I went to work at a startup… google. For me it recaptured everything I liked about Sun. And had the same CEO.

flanked-evergl 38 minutes ago | parent

Solaris was worse than Linux, and SPARC was worse than Intel. A lot worse.

Even ZFS was way better integrated with the Linux kernel even while Solaris was supposedly maintained.

whobre 34 minutes ago | parent

Eh, depends when. In 2005, sure. Not so much in the 1990s

icedchai 30 minutes ago | parent

Yep. Solaris was the Unix for the 90's. I worked at a couple of early ISPs and users demanded Sun Solaris shell servers. At a couple of startups, we built everything on Solaris because Linux wasn't accepted in the enterprise yet.

By the early 2000's, 1) Linux was solid, why bother with Solaris? 2) ebay and other channels were flooded with used Sun hardware from failed dot-com companies anyway. No need to buy new.

rwmj 7 minutes ago | parent

I was asked to benchmark some Solaris/SPARC vs Linux/Intel hardware in around 1997, and the price-performance of the Linux gear was easily 3+ times better. There wasn't really any comparison, especially when you consider how you could buy white box PCs from a local shop, grab a Red Hat ISO for nothing, and have an installed Linux server in 24 hours, compared to weeks to get something more expensive and worse for the Sun option. Even if Sun had been more reliable, it wouldn't have mattered because you could buy 3x the PCs and keep two in a cupboard, or more likely just replace everything with more numerous and better performing Linux PCs.

pjmlp 30 minutes ago | parent

Not in 2000, at my employer back then, our Linux server was only good as MP3 storage exposed via Samba/NFS.

All development and production deployments was being done across Solaris, Aix and HP-UX in regards to UNIX flavours.

icedchai 23 minutes ago | parent

I had a similar experience. I forget the exact timing, but it was probably around 2002 - 2003 that Linux felt "good enough." I was at a startup that finally considered putting its "enterprise" stack on Linux.

ImJasonH 36 minutes ago | parent

> all of these homage shirts are amazing

You can't just say that without sharing those too!

RationPhantoms 27 minutes ago | parent

Brian, I know you lurk and post here but i'd love to see those designs make their way to the store so the general public can purchase them.

cmiller1 24 minutes ago | parent

How timely, I was just thinking about Sun after doing some office rearranging last week and running into a bunch of sun branded ethernet cables.

Zigurd 21 minutes ago | parent

Making workstations even in the dominant market position that Sun had, was a cottage industry compared to technology today, and it was managed that way. I wouldn't blame management for Sun being irrelevant now.

Whatever everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. Not even Xerox. I've used aa Xerox Alto, a Sun workstation, an LMI CADR, and a Symbolics 3600, and none of them were as carefully crafted as a Macintosh with a tiny memory and a floppy disk. Next inherited this ethic.

Jobs valued the person using the machine more than anything else about the machine.

arethuza 18 minutes ago | parent

My personal favourite UI was HyperNeWS built on Sun's NeWS.

Edit: Writing PostScript and having no discernible security probably didn't make NeWS a great fit for the world of the Internet - but it was a lot of fun.

ecshafer 17 minutes ago | parent

Part of my maturing as I've gotten older is realizing how much business success actually comes from Sales, BizzDev, Product, etc. Engineering is great, but if you don't have people actually getting things shipped, getting customers, and talking with customers, you will eventually fail. Sure sometimes some internet companies find a money printer and get around this, but I think they are the exceptions to the rule. Sun having great tech, but having a shit sales channel, is not going to lead to success. Dell, small or large, they are going to get you someone on the phone and sell you a server.