What Sun got wrong: Bryan Cantrill on a company bored with the business of business
jedisct1 · x · 2026-09-22
Oxide's Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems' failures, distilling his 15-year-old analysis into one point: Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business. He cites a 2005 episode where a fast-growing OpenSolaris startup (an early cloud-computing pioneer) wanted to buy Sun hardware en masse — but Sun wouldn't answer the phone, squandering its own open-source strategy. He also nods to Scott McNealy's epitaph: in 28 years he never had to hide the newspaper in shame.
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