Re: [TUHS] Mythical Distress Sale (was Re: moving directories in svr2)

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

I think the execs did not fully appreciate what they had in SunOS.
I know that I, and many other engineers, put in a boat load of extra
effort to polish SunOS.  My first job at Sun was to do POSIX conformance
(which was one hell of an education).  Nobody asked me to do this,
but I made lint libraries for SVr3 (or 4, whatever was current), BSD,
POSIX, etc.  My thinking was that you could develop on SunOS but target
whatever you wanted.  I had to threaten to quit to get them included in
the release, Rob didn't want them in there because they added something
like 40KB to the install.  He was probably right, I doubt anyone ever
used them, but my thinking was to help the customers.  

That thinking was rampant amongst the engineers, you could show up at 7pm
and building 5 had piles of engineers polishing SunOS.  Guy Harris quit
and went to Auspex, they licensed SunOS.  He'd come pound on the door
after dinner, we'd let him in, get him logged in and he fixed bugs.
I can still here him saying "Holy smokes, they still haven't fixed
this?" and then he'd check in a fix.

I don't think the execs had a clue as to how much the engineers were
willing to make SunOS better.  We did it because everyone wanted a
Sun, it was the best of the best at the time.

On Tue, Jan 04, 2022 at 08:26:23AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> 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 

-- 
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm