Interesting article about how Sun's approach brought itself down

Posted Tue, 03/02/2010 - 18:34 by drapeau
I just read this blog post by Jeremy Allison, one of the lead developers of the Samba file server software package.  I think he's got a good take on some of the stuff Sun did wrong, considering the limited amount of space he had to write the piece.

I've often thought that we at Sun had a different attitude toward open source in our recent years from the attitude we had early on.  It seemed to me that we created standards to open markets, but always tried to control the standard instead of letting it flourish on its own.  That seems to match Allison's point of view, and he writes how that came to bite Sun back in the last decade or so.

Check it out; do you think Allison's right?  I think there are other reasons Sun got into a position where being acquired was its best end game; what do you think?


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Sun's Control

by Olga Filonchuk (not verified) - 03/03/2010 - 07:09
Really a nice post. Although I do not possess enough experience and relevant knowledge to analize Sun's mistakes I think the post covers one of the main ones. Sun could not cope with the fast changing Open Source environment and did not adjust its business model to community-friendly ideology. Hard to say why top management fully rejected the new trend offered by Linux. Total control was and is never a good choice in business. Yes, Sun was unable to compete, it was unable to satisfy their vast audience of end users. Sure there were other reasons but they may be not so obvious and...ridiculous. As it's really stupid to continiously deny innovations hoping that your profit will still increase due to...what? reputation? quality? experience? if you do not follow market rules created by your target audience, the customers will not follow you. The saddest moment in this controversial story is that the epoch did not end only for Sun. It's over for people who were with the company for all these years. In the end it's always not so much about companies' competition, but it's almost always about people.

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