Of course by mid-2000s that is different.

There is still a question about turnaround time, but just comparing the state now to early Falcon 9 is not accurate.

And both the booster and the Starship itself have proven that they can get back to ground mostly intact. So its not like they are only working on 'getting to orbit'. And clearly it is leading something desirable if the have proven that they can basically land the second and first stage, something nobody else has ever achieved.

Question how fast they can make the turn around are still there along with other question. But once you can repeatably launch you can improve much faster as they did with Falcon 9. And you can do more and more tests in shorter time, accelerating development.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vDunup8v5M&t=2940s

I'm not totally convinced by the reasoning. Would love to hear some former Sun people give an opinion on his leadership and other perspective.

> Yeah, and it was too late to edit my comment. My bad. But yes. The SPARC folks had some great ideas in the T line, but it was a) way too late, b) didn't have access to latest node size, so it wasn't going to be great-performing, c) performance sucked.

Dropping performance a little bit for Multicore was reasonable for servers, and there were some good ideas there but in practice it was far to extreme to be practical.

StorageTek was quite expensive and sold mostly very large archiving solutions. Not sure that was really the right direction. Such a huge acquisition cost a lot, not just money.

But you are right that this was not totally unreasonable. Still its pretty aggressive move for the company in the position of Sun.

> Sun needed: internal disruption.

After the disaster that was Viking. They might have gone 32bit x86, 64bit Alpha. DEC was desprate for Alpha buyers and would have made them a good deal. But they double down on going all in on SPARC and UltraSPARC confirmed them in this being the right solution.

I think one serious issue was that they took way long to realize portability.

They had rough group implement MICA OS that was supposed to be partially compatible. But the dropped MICA and PRISM and instead adopted MIPS and Ultrix. But then they never bothered to port VMS onto MIPS and their workstation line.

Then they mismanaged their whole VAX line and massive lost out to the improving Unix offerings, partly for performance and partly for 'openness' reason.

I think if they were smart they would either have gone 'all-in' on MICA and make it the future of both Unix and VMS. Or simply support both Unix and VMS on all of their platform. They were big enough that this wasn't some incredibly complex task.

They ported VMS to Alpha, but that was a 64bit machine that most people didn't need. Meaning they lost in the lower spec server spaces where Sun and HP were selling tons of Unix servers.

Had they ported VMS to MIPS and also had sold lower spec server with all these features, VMS might not have become so niche.

Personally I really believe that their complete mishandling of RISC, despite having arguably the best chip design team in the industry to be the reason for much of their failure.

They got it right initially, making Solaris with gate-array and that was a big success. Small company got RISC chip out fast and it beat what was out-there.

Then they went all in on CMOS-Bipolar chip, that was massively late, massively expensive. The completely lost the plot and were not competitive in the early 90s. Thankfully they had the software buy in from costumers, and did some good stuff otherwise (they also did the disastrous Solaris transition) but they overcame all that.

Then they did a bit better with UltraSPARC in 1995, they were still not top of the line, getting easily crushed by Alpha and others. But it was 64 bit and that helped them long term. Nowhere near 'excellent' for the time period. More like, good enough. Then they rolled on from there, but were never anywhere close to Alpha and others until around 2000.

They made all the mistakes you can make in the 90s, going heavy into Gallium Arsenide that was a disaster. Then they went heavy on VLIW technology in another disaster.

Then they completely lost the plot in the early 2000s, and eventually pretty much gave up completely and switched to marketing T1 chips and 'threw-put computing' because they couldn't produce competitive chips on single thread performance.

In fact they did switch from Texas Instruments to TSMC in that time period. You can read about that in 'Life Under the Sun: My 20-Year Journey at Sun Microsystems'. Don't take everything in that book at face value, its very much putting a positive spin on things, but it tells some of those stories.

And by the time Unix became successful it was as complex arguably VMS was at the time.

DEC didn't fail because they supported VMS, in fact VMS was great costumer lock in for them and its still made money for HP despite being developed in the late 70s.

And in terms of clustering, Unix has never matched VMS.

DEC didn't fail because of VMS. Their big failure was not to make a fast RISC workstation that ran VMS early enough. And then in then in the late 80s not switching to RISC fast enough with VMS.

So I think he had a point, most serious banks and insurances did run VMS and paid lots of money for it for the next 20 years. VMS was not the reason DEC ran into issues. Their complete management of first personal systems, then workstations, then mainframes, then RISC servers is what destroyed them.

Well he became leader when it was clear that they were deep in the shit. Then he was ask if SPARC should just be killed of. He said know but said he would need 4-5 years to turn it around. And I would argue he didn't even if they made some waves with Sparc T1 chip.

Ultimately I would argue anybody reasonable would go back to conversation and say, we need to kill SPARC and switch to x86 as fast as possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vDunup8v5M

He said he killed x86 but wanted to it only temporary, as some sort of political move around Itanium.

And yes of course, a rack of commodity servers should how powered the server side, as this was a task that could be scaled vertically quite well.

The also didn't use the cheapest possible Sun Ray terminals, they used their internal developed embedded Sparc chip, not mass produced ARM chips.

There is an interesting interview with they guy responsible. He basically even said it was a mistake and he knew it, and he internally signaled 'don't worry its just temporary' but there was a cooperate need to signal support for SPARC. Seemed to be internally political.

I think he didn't realize how externally this would look for the viability of Solaris on x86.

> - Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.

Can you give some context. I am interested in Sun history and I don't know that one.

> - UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison.

What do you mean, UltraSPARC was in 1995. A decade earlier was pre commercial RISC.

(Edit: I see you mean Sparc T1, but those chips were trash, they were not to late. They were good marketing above good product)

UltraSPARC was one of the few actually successful developments. Unlike pretty much every other CPU project at Sun starting in the 90s.

> - The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid.

Also StorageTek.

They talked about buying Apple, and they could have, but the CEO basically admitted they had no clue what so ever on what to do with Apple.

They had no vision or concept of what being a consumer company would even be like. Even in the 80s they were focused on engineers and costumers like that, never end costumers.

Neither food, nor shelter, nor healthcare are natural monopolies. As evidence by the fact that non of them are remotely monopolistic in places where there are no restrictions. Monopolies in these sectors are created and enforced by the state. Unless you are using a completely different definition from all economists.

Ironically major shops sell stables such as rice below price or at basically 0 margin, just to get people into the store where they might buy something of higher margin.

There is a huge difference also between subsidizing demand with private supply and providing supply. Exactly the debate that is relevant in healthcare as well. A system can do both, or neither or a combination of the two.

Not sure why you are making an argument about food subsidizes to me, I have not argued in favor of them.

> More than half of all calories produced in the US are not even for human consumption.

Most of those go threw animals and are then consumed by humans. There is a lost factor there but saying its not for human consumption misses the point I would say. For Chicken, Pork and fish the lost factor is pretty small.