[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[John Dallman]

In article <unehno$14f82$1 at dont-email.me>, arne at vajhoej.dk (Arne Vajhøj)
wrote:

> Sun had a problem:
> - Solaris/SPARC servers were more expensive than Linux/x86-64 
>   servers
> - the applications running on Solaris/SPARC were typically not that
>   difficult to port to Linux
> 
> Asking for a premium without sufficient vendor lock-in is a bad
> business case.

Their responses were also not that great: 

They open-sourced their OS in the belief that this would "reduce
development costs" as Linux people switched to working on Solaris. This
didn't happen to any noticeable extent. The open-sourcing part created
lots of work for expensive lawyers and slowed software development. 

Cut back their hardware development, since it was expensive, making their
systems even less competitive. 

They ended up selling themselves to Oracle, of course. Oracle's plan was
vertical integration: tuning up SPARC and Solaris hardware for Oracle
database so they had a price-performance advantage on their own hardware.
A great plan, except that the tuning had already been done and there was
no unrealised performance available. 

John