Looking at dtrace, fishwork, zfs and Solaris (imo was the best OS technologically speaking) it's interesting to see how strong and innovative its engineering team was while the business was just going down. How did that happen? How can the engineering team be that productive and functional while the business vision was so lacking?
Even when commercially misguided, Sun always had terrific engineering talent -- and my farewell to the company captures some of that.[1] In terms of why did the company fail, the short answer is probably that SPARC was disrupted by x86, and by the time the company figured that out, it was too late to recover.[2]
I've always been very impressed by Sun's talent, the team was . And thank you for dtrace! :) If only Linux community / leaders would be less arrogant and adopt technologies from Solaris/BSD that are order of magnitude better (kqueue, netgraph and more) instead of coming up with new ways to screw up.
Sun should be resurrected now given that risc is leading the way and build everything on top of ARM! :). if only.
there's no license for kqueue's interface or netgraph, and many other great interfaces. but they decide to create square wheels and not leverage from errors that others have made before them.
