From: arnold@skeeve.com
To: lm@mcvoy.com, gingell@computer.org
Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Mythical Distress Sale (was Re: moving directories in svr2)
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2022 08:26:23 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <202201041526.204FQNEb028767@freefriends.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20220104151735.GD22599@mcvoy.com>
OK, serious question. Why did Sun "sell out" to AT&T if they could
have raised capital in the market? Did the executive team just not
care about what moving to System V would mean? Or did they not understand
it?
How desperate were they? And why were they so desparate? Were there
other alternatives they could have pursued?
I too lived through those times, from the outside, and it was indeed
a shocker when they moved from SunOS to Solaris.
Thanks,
Arnold
Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> Rob, you've painted this picture before and it just doesn't match up
> at all with what I saw. I was there. Ken Okin paid me for 6 months to
> try and convince the execs to not go to SVR4. If it was all sweetness
> and light, why did he do that?
>
> You make it sound like it was a nice friendly deal. It was $200M of
> Sun stock at 35% over market rate. Who does that just to be friends?
> You say you could have gone to market and gotten that, well, sure,
> but not at 35% over market.
>
> SunOS was winning all the deals, as you point out, Sun was growing
> like crazy. I did lots and lots of customer presentations and not once
> did I hear "oh, when are you guys going to standardize on System V?"
>
> Quite the opposite in fact. I was doing a talk at the Moscone center
> on the first Sun cluster that I had built, Scott refused to let me ship
> it with SunOS, so I was being a good soldier and talking up Solaris.
> Over and over and over I was asked why we were forcing people to use
> an obviously worse OS and I finally lost it and said "I know, I have
> everything working in SunOS but they won't let me ship it."
>
> I was on tape. Okin listened to the tape and said "get every copy of
> those tapes and destroy them". Not exactly the friendly everyone
> agreeing picture you paint. Not remotely like that.
>
> Rob, I lived through that time. One of my close friends, John Pope,
> did the bring up. He felt alienated from all the other kernel people
> because we all loved SunOS and we hated Solaris, it made zero sense to
> go that far backward. And look what it got you. Sun is gone.
>
> If you could have gone to market and gotten the money, you would
> have. Sun was killing it, everyone wanted a Sun over every other
> workstation, in the SunOS days, every open source thing just built
> on Suns. Everyone else had to twiddle the makefiles and the source.
> Your story that people wanted a standard just doesn't hold up when
> you were the standard. It also doesn't hold up when every single
> customer I talked to (and I talked to them at least twice a month
> in formal presentations and frequently more like twice a week,
> the sales people loved me) never asked for SVR4. Not once did that
> come up. And when SVR4 was being pushed on them, 100% of them
> pushed back and wanted SunOS.
>
> On Tue, Jan 04, 2022 at 01:28:20AM -0800, Rob Gingell wrote:
> > On 1/3/2022 6:28 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > >Of course, that's assuming that Sun could have stayed afloat without
> > >that injection of cash from AT&T....
> >
> > What causes you to assert that Sun was at risk of not staying afloat?
> >
> > Sun went from $0/yr to over $1B/yr in revenue between 1982 and 1988, the
> > prototype for what people now call "unicorns".
> >
> > Between 1985 and 1989 Sun grew at a compounded rate of 145% a year, and
> > according to Forbes was the fastest growing company in the US in those
> > years.
> >
> > Doesn't sound like a company foundering to me, certainly not in 1987 and
> > 1988. Didn't sound like it to AT&T either, who wanted in on the action and
> > so bought a bunch of Sun stock on terms very favorable to Sun (and
> > financially speaking of benefit to both companies when AT&T divested some
> > years later).
> >
> > The injection of capital was certainly useful to Sun, not because of
> > distress or failure, but because it was bursting at the seams from all the
> > growth. Sun was going to get that capital without AT&T by going to the
> > market anyway, that it was able to do so on more favorable terms with an
> > already established partner was literally an example of the rich getting
> > richer. The partnership to inject SunOS technologies, do SVR4, harmonize the
> > various UNIX flavors had already been committed and launched some months
> > before the investment occurred and wasn't contingent upon it.
> >
> > They're not unrelated of course, the investment occurred in the context of
> > the already committed partnership. And if you examine the announced
> > expectations of that partnership it included some strong dependencies on Sun
> > products and technologies by AT&T in both the near and long term. The
> > gestalt of the investment was that it was a consequence of "well, if we're
> > already doing all this, then..."
> >
> > Certainly the later transitions in Sun's products had lots of issues. But
> > lessons aren't gained from "well, they meant well, but, poor sods, they were
> > barely staying alive" especially when the premise isn't even remotely
> > accurate.
> >
> > It's a much more interesting examination to consider: "they had agency, they
> > made choices, the context was <pretty complex>, why that and not this, what
> > was the alternative, etc." Since we can have the facts, why not premise the
> > discussions on those?
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2022-01-04 15:26 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 49+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-12-30 3:45 [TUHS] moving directories in svr2 Noel Chiappa
2021-12-30 4:02 ` Bakul Shah
2021-12-30 16:40 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-12-30 22:31 ` Dan Cross
2021-12-31 0:43 ` Bakul Shah
2021-12-31 1:00 ` Rob Pike
2021-12-31 1:45 ` Bakul Shah
2021-12-31 2:23 ` Adam Thornton
2021-12-31 18:56 ` Chet Ramey
2021-12-31 3:08 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-12-31 3:23 ` Rob Pike
2021-12-31 5:16 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-12-31 5:21 ` Dan Cross
2021-12-31 5:55 ` Rob Pike
2021-12-31 13:32 ` Michael Kjörling
2021-12-31 15:53 ` Adam Thornton
2021-12-31 16:13 ` Arthur Krewat
2021-12-31 18:17 ` Dan Cross
2021-12-31 18:23 ` Larry McVoy
2021-12-31 18:37 ` Dan Cross
2021-12-31 18:29 ` Arthur Krewat
2022-01-01 0:09 ` Theodore Ts'o
2022-01-03 13:35 ` Dan Cross
2022-01-03 20:23 ` Theodore Ts'o
2022-01-03 20:45 ` Warner Losh
2022-01-03 21:15 ` Dan Cross
2022-01-03 22:26 ` Theodore Ts'o
2022-01-03 23:10 ` Dan Cross
2022-01-04 15:45 ` Chet Ramey
2022-01-09 19:28 ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-03 23:21 ` Doug McIntyre
2022-01-03 23:37 ` Adam Thornton
2022-01-04 14:49 ` Stuart Remphrey
2022-01-03 23:44 ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-03 23:56 ` [TUHS] SMP: BSD vs System V (once was: moving directories in svr2) Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2022-01-07 19:01 ` Warner Losh
2022-01-09 17:31 ` Stuart Remphrey
2022-01-13 2:35 ` Kevin Bowling
2022-01-03 23:56 ` [TUHS] moving directories in svr2 Warner Losh
2022-01-04 2:28 ` Theodore Ts'o
2022-01-04 2:42 ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-04 9:28 ` [TUHS] Mythical Distress Sale (was Re: moving directories in svr2) Rob Gingell
2022-01-04 15:17 ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-04 15:26 ` arnold [this message]
2022-01-04 15:40 ` Larry McVoy
2022-01-04 15:48 ` Richard Salz
2022-01-03 22:57 ` [TUHS] moving directories in svr2 Phil Budne
2022-01-04 15:40 ` [TUHS] VRFs (was Re: moving directories in svr2) Derek Fawcus
2021-12-31 5:12 ` [TUHS] moving directories in svr2 Bakul Shah
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=202201041526.204FQNEb028767@freefriends.org \
--to=arnold@skeeve.com \
--cc=gingell@computer.org \
--cc=lm@mcvoy.com \
--cc=tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).