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From the Editors: Innovation is Sun's legacy

By SD Times Editorial Board

August 15, 2009 — (Page 1 of 2)
Much has been written about the mishaps and missteps that led to the decline and fall of Sun Microsystems. At its height, it was a Silicon Valley powerhouse whose servers “put the dot in dot-com” nearly a decade ago. Today, the company is being acquired for a relatively paltry sum by Oracle.

It’s easy to take shots at where Sun fell short. Purchasing companies and failing to commercialize them, such as its acquisition of Cobalt Networks. Spending a fortune on an open-source software without explaining the return on investment, like its US$1 billion buy of MySQL AB in early 2008. Stumbling in attempts to take leadership in Java application servers, a market that it invented—then lost.

It’s also easy to pin the blame on Jonathan Schwartz, who took over the reins as Sun’s president in 2004, and became CEO in 2006. While SD Times has been critical of Schwartz, we also note that the company had been trending downward before his ascension—and he apparently had the company’s cofounder and chairman, Scott McNealy, backing him up.

Rather than take those shots, we’ll pause for a moment and think about the genuine innovation that characterized this truly unique company. Sun had a profound impact on Silicon Valley and the entire computer industry. Its SPARC processor came to dominate the world of RISC-based servers and led the industry toward 64-bit computing. Sun’s version of Unix, called Solaris, earned a reputation for stability and reliability, and introduced cutting-edge features like DTrace and ZFS. On the small side, the Sun SPOT wireless devices continue to fire the imagination.

The Java language, invented at Sun, and the Java Virtual Machine gave the software development world its first commercially successful managed runtime environment. “Write Once, Run Anywhere,” while never perfectly implemented by competing Java EE vendors, remains a compelling vision that isn’t equaled anywhere in the mainstream computing world. The Java Community Process brought together many of those competitors and provided a successful forum for evolving the Java platform.

Related Search Term(s): open source, Sun

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