4 Jan
2022
4 Jan
'22
9:26 p.m.
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(a)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:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 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?