Sun Microsystems spent the 1980s and 1990s being almost preternaturally right about computing. Workstations on every desk. Networks as the computer. Java as a universal runtime. NFS for shared storage. The SPARC architecture. Open-source Solaris. Each prediction landed ahead of schedule and Sun reaped the rewards accordingly, becoming one of the most valuable technology companies on earth at the peak of the dot-com bubble. Then the bubble burst, the commodity x86 server ate Sun’s lunch, and a series of strategic decisions that looked bold at the time began looking less so in retrospect. Oracle acquired what remained in 2010 for $7.4 billion — a fraction of Sun’s peak valuation — and proceeded to litigate Java rather than evolve it. The engineering culture that produced NFS, ZFS, DTrace, and half of modern systems software is gone. “We’re the dot in dot-com,” Sun’s CEO once said. He was not wrong.
