Sun

At Sun Microsystems I worked in the Solaris group.  Specifically I worked on Sun Cluster.  I was not happy at Sun.  Technically I thought Sun Cluster was inferior to the Tandem software.  The technical leadership of our product was in the hands of academics who did not understand user-interface issues at all, and yet ruled with an iron hand with regards to UI design.  The strategy waffled from web-based to rich client and back to web-based.  As a consequence we were on our third implementation by the time I left.  Moreover, the company was extremely bureaucratic both in terms of administrative functions as well as technical process.  Every design had to go before a design review committee—which was theoretically a good idea, but they were so backlogged that it created a significant bottleneck for getting anything done.  We ended up appeasing committee members with compromised designs to avoid having to present to the whole committee.  We were never given the opportunity to argue the merits of our design to a committee member who was too busy to give our designs the study they deserved. 

 

The Sun Cluster product competed with a clustering product from VERITAS that was superior in every way to ours.  We knew it.  Yet, Sun felt obliged to keep plugging away.

 

At Sun, of course, I had a Sun workstation in my office.  I missed my NT workstation, which had better tools, such as word processors and email, compared to those provided by Sun.  But the Sun CEO hated Microsoft, so we weren’t allowed to use any Microsoft tools at work.

 

After three months at Sun I asked my old manager at Tandem/Compaq about the possibility of coming back.  He emailed me an offer complete with salary and stock options.  People at Sun (including another former Tandem employee) encouraged me to give it more time—I would adjust.  The biggest single regret of my career is that I took that advice. 

 

After sticking it out at Sun for a year and a half, they made changes to my work schedule that I considered incompatible with my health.  (I was recovering from a serious arm injury.)  That was the last straw—I called up a start-up company that had expressed interest in me; they made an offer and I gladly left Sun. 

 

Mark Twain once said, “I joined the Confederate Army.  After a month I deserted.  And the Confederacy fell.”    Sun hasn’t quite failed since I left.  But their fortunes have been going nowhere but down. 

 

To back up a bit:  When I joined Sun, we were in the middle of what was referred to as the “dot-com craze”.  It was incredibly easy—too easy—for a startup company to get funding for some Internet-based product.  Many of these products used Sun server computers and Sun was riding high.

 

But then there was the dot-com crash.  The market finally corrected for the overzealousness of Internet-based businesses.  Many of the dot-com ideas were nothing short of crazy.  Many startups had business models that were unworkable, and products that no one really wanted.  So it all came crashing down.  It created the worst recession in Silicon Valley’s history, with many, many programmers becoming out of work.  And Sun’s fortunes fell with it.  Suddenly slightly used Sun servers were on the auction block from failed companies.  With virtually no buyers for these used systems, Sun had an impossible time finding customers for its “new” systems. 

 

I still own a jacket given to me by Sun.  It has the logo on the back, “We’re the dot in dot-com.”  It is a slogan they have disavowed.   But I still wear the jacket.  Not out of spite—but it is the most comfortable jacket I own.

 

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