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                    "We have the whole Oxide team coming to Emeryville this week for our\nannual OxCon meetup. For a remote company, an in-person meeting is\nuniquely energizing, and in preparation for that, we made some\nt-shirts featuring Oxide logos that are an homage to past computer\ncompanies.\nThanks to our designer\nextraordinaire, Ben Leonard,\nall of these homage shirts are amazing\u2009\u2014\u2009but one of them was\nsimply too hot to leave as a surprise:\n\n\n\n\nUnsurprisingly, this shirt has stirred up a bunch\nof nostalgia for Sun.  Much of the fondness for\nSun has been earned:\nOxide\u2019s mission\ncomes directly from Scott McNealy\u2019s epitaph for Sun\u2009\u2014\u2009and Scott\u2019s reflection that over 28 years he \"never had to hide the newspaper in shame\nfrom my children\" remains\nwords that all companies should live by.\nBut the nostalgia can also become suffocating\u2009\u2014\u2009to the point where folks\nthat post-date Sun may reasonably\ndemand to hear what Sun did wrong.\nAnd of course, Sun did plenty wrong; while I was never ashamed to work for\nSun, I was not infrequently embarrassed by the stuff we screwed up.\nEvery Sun employee will have their own perspective on what Sun got wrong,\nand\nI talked about my own view in\na Hacker News comment in 2011.\nI stand by that analysis, but another 15 years on (!), I would probably\ndistill things even further:\nSun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.\nSun\u2019s disinterest is embodied in an episode from 2005,\nwhen a startup that was running its infrastructure on OpenSolaris\nwas looking to buy Sun gear.\nThis is\u2009\u2014\u2009or should have been\u2009\u2014\u2009a vindication of Sun\nmaking Solaris open source:  the startup was growing like a weed,\npioneering what we would later call cloud computing.\nThe startup was using Sun\u2019s software, and wanted to buy a ton of\nSun hardware; the model worked!\nExcept, it didn\u2019t.  The customer could not get Sun to pick up the phone.\n(And when Sun did pick up the phone, they tried to sell them the wrong\nproduct.)\nThis was in sharp contrast to their experience with Dell:  the startup filled out a web form in the\nmiddle of the night, and the next morning\u2026\u200b\n\n\n\u2026\u200bthe phone rings, it\u2019s Steve the local Dell account executive, and thus began the process where we all came under the impression that Steve actually worked for us. In less than 2 weeks we had some chances to \u201cpitch\u201d the company to get into a certain pricing tier, had all the servers in the datacenter, and had managed to get it all leased based purely on the company\u2019s financials (no personal guarantees). And honestly, 95% of all of the work was done by Steve. I felt like a Big Company. I felt like Steve worked for me.\n\n\nWe know all of this because the startup did Sun the tremendous\nservice of writing it all up\nin a blog entry,\nThe Sun Doesn\u2019t Shine on Me.\nI remember (vividly!) where I was when I read that blog entry:\nwe had just\nstarted Fishworks,\nand we were squatting in a corner of some abandoned Sun office\nspace while awaiting a more permanent home in San Francisco.\nMy heart sank as I read it, in part because it represented\nso much strategic success, and yet was ultimately a story of operational\nfailure.\nI remember thinking that a company that has become bored with\nthe mechanics of running a business cannot succeed\u2009\u2014\u2009no matter how\nsuccessful its\nstrategy might otherwise be.\nSun continued for a few more years, and we tried like hell to\nright the ship, but it wasn\u2019t enough;\nSun didn\u2019t make it.\n\nFor those outside of Sun, our homage to Sun (and to other defunct computer companies!) may seem purely nostalgic, but to us, it\u2019s something deeper:\nwe admire these companies for the important things that they got\nright, but we study them to learn what they got wrong.  We honor\nthem best by learning from both\u2009\u2014\u2009to be at once inspired and warned!"
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