The initial shock of the Oracle deal is starting to fade. Without doubt there will be lingering regret, sadness, and quite rightly anger, for years to come. Some have referred to Sun as being as much a religion as a company, and for some of us that perhaps more true that we wish to admit. In that light, placations like “its business, not personal” is little consolation. We’ve lost something and an era has past into history, much like DEC, something is gone that we can’t get back.
In the wake, there is a fear for a great many of us. A lot of us have a lot of stock in Sun Microsystems… not shares of common or preferred, but emotional, personal, professional. How many of us are known as “the Sun guy”… a great many. What happens to that intangible vested stock? What do we do?
Sound over-dramatic? I’m sure that about half of you reading this are thinking “really, life goes on, get a grip” and the other half are now struggling with an uncertainty you previously took for granted. It is to the latter that I speak.
Almost everyone seems to agree that given the choice between IBM and Oracle, the latter is better. I admit I liked IBM as a prospect only because I think that the cultures of Sun and IBM are so different that the two couldn’t integrate. Rather, Sun would be like a rebel alliance deep within the deathstar. Some element of the counter-culture would survive. But Oracle… they fit almost too well, I can see the two integrating and it will force Sun’s products back into that old enterprise mentality.
I think whats really changed at Sun in the last 10 years is a shift in the definition of “enterprise”. It used to be those with the cash for big SPARC servers, Solaris licenses, and a passion for support contracts. The shift was for us to counter Linux by saying “everything is (or can be) enterprise”! Solaris is the premier enterprise grade operating system, and you can put it on your E10K, or your X4200, or your Supermicro, or your Asus EEE. DTrace belongs on your $500,000 server and your MacBook.
Whats the underlying problem Sun has been unwilling to face? I think its that Sun is too many things to too many people. We all have solutions for how to “fix Sun”… but all of our solutions are different. Because we all see Sun differently. My brother-in-law is one of the industries premier J2ME developers; we’re on opposite parts of the same company, he could care less about the systems group, and I believe that Sun is a systems company and should focus there. As I’ve said many times in the past, Sun is a house divided. And for all the attempts and efforts, producing a real end-to-end offering hasn’t bore enough fruit.
I think Oracle is going to do what Sun’s management has been too afraid to do… their going to make the tough choices and unify the products. Its going to be painful and ugly… but they may finally align all the cogs and wheels to provide aligned solutions. They’ve said as much in the initial releases and I believe it thoroughly.
People keep speculating on what will survive and what will be chomped. Will Oracle kill X86? Or will they dump OpenSolaris? Or will they…. Frankly, I doubt non-overlapping products have any concern. Some of the middleware will be integrated and melt into the mix, but I think thats the extent. Rather, I expect Oracle to do a lot of pruning. Just as with gardening, you need to trim away less productive stems to channel maximum resource into those with the most promise. Therefore I think we’ll see fewer offerings, but much stronger ones.
For those of us with a vested interest in Sun, I think this is a time to shine. The change will be potentially radical, and that provides an opportunity for first-mover advantage. There are going to be a lot of questions, a lot of concerns, a lot of uncertainty, and people with answers and solutions stand to gain. Consulting should be lucrative. Bloggers and writers, and those who are ready to help on mailing lists and within organizations can prosper.
The key is to pick ourselves up, individual and collectively, and be ready to embrace the change. Not because we want to, but because thats the reality of it.
If Oracle does what it seeks to do, there should more opportunity for skilled Solaris admins and developers than we’ve seen in several years. All that SPARC knowledge you shelved may need a refresher. And if Oracle can truly provide that end-to-end experience, there will be a tremendous need for engineers that not only understand UNIX or even Solaris, but understand DTrace and ZFS and ILOM and LDOMs and xVM and Crossbow and Zones and SPARC and Cluster and on and on. The value will come from those individuals who not just understand a given Sun technology but rather a complete integrated stack view.
Oracle’s going to follow up product offerings with support and consulting… but we all know that only goes so far, the rest of us will need to go the distance.
So my advice is nothing extraordinary, but rather the obvious, as an encouragement. Soon all your skills may be required of you. We all have a head start. If Oracle puts its weight behind Solaris and even SPARC it may dislodge some of the inroads Linux has made and put Solaris back on top in the enterprises of the world. We must be ready, we must be watchful, and we must seize opportunity as it arises.
DEC went down a road of destruction. We can be thankful we’ve been spared a similar fate, which may well have been with IBM. As sysadmins, developers, enthusiasts, employees, partners… as a community… we’ve got to dust ourselves off and look ahead and look around us for all the possibilities that present themselves.
I’ll leave you with this thought:
A wise and dear friend of mine today asked me: “Where does your allegiance lie: with Sun or with Solaris?” That’s a question each of us has to re-evaluate very carefully.
Nice to see your optimism Ben. I must admit, I’ll be also quite sad if and when Sun is no more. There’s something strangely comforting about the company, and while it’s fair to say there has been as many down times as up times in the last few years, I still feel Sun was *so nearly there* in terms of getting the right direction (despite the distractions of a huge product line). I think we could all do with a change, and hopeful that this will be a step in the right direction. Time will tell.
“A wise and dear friend of mine today asked me: “Where does your allegiance lie: with Sun or with Solaris?” That’s a question each of us has to re-evaluate very carefully.”
With Solaris, perhaps. With Sun – not any longer. As a customer, I cannot possibly reconcile Schwartz’s assurances in his FOURTH MOST RECENT BLOG ENTRY that everything was fine and dandy, when with the 20/20 vision of hindsight him and Sun management would have been shopping Sun around for *months*.
Still, some people wouldn’t call that lying.
And his email to Sun staff is simply the icing on the cake.
My eye will be on the Cantrills, Bonwicks, Greggs and Levanthals of the company – i.e the true heart of everything that made me a fan of this Sun – and where they eventually end up in the coming months.
@gary: well … at first … don´t believe all this stuff in the newspaper. Just looking at the date of the reports, that Sun was begging for a return of IBM to the negotiation table and the rumours about the timeline with Oracle negotiations with Oracle. Just as a reminder about the quality of the press. This situation was the last nail to the coffin of credibility of the IT press. I just won´t believe anything i read when i can´t confirm it from independet sources or see the SEC filing. And other people should do it the same.
@ben: I think you are right with your optimistic view. A very good article.
Well said! I think many old timers would love to see Sun made it on her own. But now that it is now, I think taking on the outlook as you said would be best thing from now on.
While the going get tough, the toughs get going. Can be hard, but take some comforts in that we have tried and leave no regrets. Thanks for spelling out some of the echo in my heart
“While the going get tough, the toughs get going.”
No, when the going got tough, the tough sold out.
Well said Ben, well said.
My allegiance is clearly with Solaris (and Solaris Express, but NOT “OpenSolaris”).
Sun has made me so unhappy since 2005, that I couldn’t care less about the company.
Having said that, all of the Solaris sysadmins will be in even higher demand in two to three years, than they are today.
Why then? Because that’s when I expect the first fruit borne of the ORACLE+Sun tree.
Solaris in demand? Yes! But what will be in demand even more are UNIX-Solaris guys which know ORACLE.
Think of it as UNIX sysadmin-DBA hybrid.
This is where it will be at. ORACLE DBAs and PL/SQL developers with HARDCORE UNIX knowledge.
I can already see US dollars, Euros and Francs dancing in front of my eyes.
Yes! More Solaris trainings, more Oracle certifications!
Jokes aside – no bad things happen without good things. I don`t know what exactly this “good things” will be, but I sure – they exist.
Seems, like I`m in time have switched an year ago from Linux to Solaris.
If Sun was/is different things to different people, it means that Sun was never really “one” to begin with. The loss that so many experience seems to be comprised of many different losses, that happen to share the Sun name. In this respect, this common name might be less relevant than it seems
Maybe the focus should indeed be shifted to the gems within Sun that we value most, whether it’s products or culture. And until these are actually axed, they’re not really lost at all.
I haven’t been a Sun customer for that many years, so please forgive me for being a bit more detached, but the “All Is Lost!” claims seem both premature and damaging(!) to whatever remains after this merger. The Sun and Solaris brands are still with us, so let’s wait and see instead of taking them down ourselves.
As someone who works almost exclusively in MySQL, with the exception of one application that uses Oracle 9 (a database I truly despise) this merger is a doomsday scenario that would most likely not have occurred had the IBM deal succeeded. This may be a hard day for Sun hardware and OS folk, but for someone who’s made a career off of LAMP, it means changing my skill set, changing my application architecture, changing my technology, and worst of all, changing my cute little acronym. :’(
Maybe shaking up how one develops apps every ten years is a good thing, but it’s also scary as hell.
Ben — thanks for the perspective and the hope. With so much vested interest in Solaris (and Sun hardware) it’s tough not be concerned but you’re right that we all need to brush off the dust on move on.
When the first rumblings about IBM came out our AIX guy was proudly stating that ‘we are going to be ALL IBM now!’. So, that fell through and though I’m not the type to say “hey, were going to be all Solaris now” I see Oracle as less of a threat than IBM. It really seems too soon to say what will happen for sure but we do need to move on just the same.
David — Many are concerned about the fate of MySQL. While the name may or may not slip away the project will live on as mariadb. (http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB). Also, SAMP / LAMP really are not too different in terms of just serving content — If you already know Linux you will quickly learn some flavor of Solaris.
Keep the faith…
BTW censorship of blog.sun.com has now kicked in.
Welcome to the future.
Dude, now’s a good time to get a life. Dump all this solaris crap, buy a real computer (Try a Mac), and listen to some good R&B grooves on iTunes. Then, start paying for software – get used to it – companies that give away everything end up being bought by the likes of Oracle. Scott McNealy once said – Have lunch or Be lunch. Today, he is lunch.
Nicely put Ben. I’m so upset to see Sun go, words can’t express my current disappointment with the board and upper management. As you say, life goes on, but I still can’t see anything on oracle.com that suggests that the company’s actually run by humans
Who knows if I’ll be one of them soon.
The irony is that the Sun founders started off trying to sell their workstation designs to IBM. When IBM didn’t bite, they started Sun Microsystems. This wouldn’t be the first time IBM didn’t “get it”. Cringely had an interesting take on the deal (www.cringely.com). I think you are hoping that most of Sun will stay intact rather than cut up and sold off. Java will survive. Solaris may survive as OpenSolaris, but Sun has always been more about hardware than software. The software was there to help the hardware sell. Oracle, a purely software company, may keep the bits it needs to help sell more database copies, but in the end, SPARC fab and therefore the hardware except for storage business will likely be sold off. If that scenario comes to pass, Sun will likely go the way of DEC for the most part. You and your buddies must make a decision whether your community can salvage all of your OpenSolaris work or not. If Oracle doesn’t care for OpenSolaris and doesn’t release the rights to the software, the OpenSolaris community will have to decide whether it’s feasible to fork the project or not under a BSD license or something similar. If it’s not, then the community will likely not survive.
It’s a shame that Sun will be no more. Unfortunately, business isn’t about logic or quality. One only needs to see the financial industry’s meltdown to realize that sometimes executives do things that are best for them rather than the firm, the employees, or the shareholders. The Sun executives and shareholders may come out with something from this, but the employees, the customers, and the communities that are devoted to Sun have lost a great deal more than just money. They’ve lost something they valued more than money, something bordering on the spiritual. You don’t have a following like Sun’s without being a bit of a believer in their ethic. I won’t use such as strong word as fanatic, it’s close to the truth. Good luck.
I think John has hit the nail on the head – couldn’t put it any better myself.
I thought the following cartoon sums it up nicely as well – and looks like employees aren’t swallowing Schwartz’s lies quite as nicely as some would hope:
http://blogs.sun.com/kazem/entry/better_than_copperfield
No prizes for guessing who the beady-eyed chap with the, er, ponytail is…
Ben,
With almost everyone concentrating on commodity computing what Oracle is likely to do is to offer a “database in a box”, which can be a powerful, highly available, and scalable appliance. Their selling point will be a “simple” solution where everything is “optimized” and “pre-configured” ahead of time. They will try to convince the IT manager to downsize their Unix SA and DBA staff because they will be doing all of it for you as a service/product.
While understanding your desire for optimism and being sure that Oracle will keep Solaris (and may be even SPARC), I wouldn’t be so sure about the SA jobs. With the advancement of virtualization and commodity-based computing the OS a a concept is about to go through a transformation. Those skills you are writing about may be outdated in a few years time anyways. Being a former “Sun guy” myself I don’t believe a monolithic OS has a strong future and in not, therefore, worth investing a lot of effort professionally. There are may other fun areas out there to explore, however.
I hope that Oracle will be be to provide a much needed focus to what is remaining of SUNW … or should I say JAVA?
I’m hoping Solaris Zones get merged into Mac OS X. Solaris has great features but the GUI isn’t there. Apple buying Sun would have made sense. Easy to use GUI and powerful solaris fetures.
^^ Apple buying Sun would have made the least sense. Goodbye Sun Ray, hello hardware and software lock-in left, right, and centre.
I couldn’t possibly put my business IT needs in the hands of a company that is busy running an online music store, or pumping out mobile music players.
And their CEO is a total autocrat to boot. Sun wouldn’t have stood a chance.
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