Yes, I am talking about SUN Microsystems that officially requested NASDAQ to delist its stock the equivalent of turning out the lights and closing the doors. Silicon Valley is anything but a sentimental place. The pace at which things changes is incredible and the speed of the undercurrent can only be felt if you get intertwined with the humdrum of daily chores in this majestic place. Companies come and go, they start. They fail. We move on. But every once a while a giant falls and so it is with SUN which now goes by Oracle. Larry Ellison closed it $7.4 Billion deal last week and after 28 years SUN is no more.
Of course Sun leaves a trail blazing technological legacy. Its famous marketing claim that it’s the “dot in the dot-com” wasn’t hyperbole. I remember knowing the Sun servers before I was even initiated into IT. Sun pushed the idea of networked computers before most of their customers have even contemplated the possibility. It built the servers and storage to make it happen. Most of the world’s cutting edge application still resides on Sun Servers. It created Java, a programming language that allowed developers around the world to write large and complex programs for business that could run across different platforms. It was Sun that espoused the now often used concept of “platform agnostic”. Programs built in Java can be literally ported across different platform and need not be customized.
SUN has shaped Silicon Valley in ways that only a few companies have. It had the full spectrum of valley culture – an engineering vibe; an appetite for risk and a propensity for making big bets on the future. However, after the last dot com burst early in the last decade, Sun kept on struggling with fierce competition from IBM and HP. Somewhere along the way Sun lost the ability to “innovate”, the key criteria for being successful in Silicon Valley. This made them vulnerable to attacks and Oracle didn't lose too much time to go for the kill. However, it is no less inspiring to know the fact that leaders of some of the biggest compnaies in the Silicon Valley is led by people who have their roots in Sun. Consider Ed Zander of Motorola, Erich Schmidt of Google, Carlos Bratz of Yahoo and so on. It is just not co-incidence that there are countless companies that has been started by individuals who once occupied the cubicles in Sun not to talk about Sun Founders Vinod khosla, Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim who are legends themselves.
Sun’s demise and reincarnation as Oracle reminded me of Hindu mythology that it’s the body that dies, soul remains free and there is life after death. I do believe the characteristics that made Sun once the darling of internet will again finds it way within Oracale.
Acknowledgement : The picture of this blog post have been picked up on internet from one of the bolg of a Sun employee
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