I'm not sure it matters if Sun buys Apple. Jobs probably ends up taking NeXT in the direction he took Apple upon return.
Steve Jobs is the key to a lot of stuff and the revolution in personal and consumer computing in the 2000's. I don't think it matters what company he does that under.
Besides NeXT being largely unsuccessful, it was also entirely enterprise-oriented. In an alternate history, perhaps Jobs leverages his fortune and hollywood connections to start "iPod Inc." He always envied Sony's expertise at consumer gadgets.
Mac never has grown beyond a small slice of the overall personal computer market. iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc. were absolutely revolutions that created and dominated entire markets, even today. However IMHO Apple still never got beyond a niche of the market for desktop/laptop computers. They build beautiful desktop/laptop hardware but the market seems happy with cheap devices that run Windows.
You're not wrong but there is a cachet with Macs that is undeniable. It's not unusual for the executives or creatives to use Macs in an otherwise fully Windows based organization.
I don’t know. Obviously windows machines outsell macs. But when I go to (programming) conferences, I always count the machines in the room. 40-60% are macs, the remainder a mix of windows and Linux.
When I visit any of my 3 kids on their respect campuses. I see the same. Some times even stronger.
I spent time in Boston 2 weeks ago and rode the tubes a lot. I saw a LOT of MacBooks. Way more than all other laptops combined.
The Mac laptop has gone back and forth being the top laptop manufacturer in the world. It’s currently third but has been 2nd and first. It’s always been the most profitable.
I don’t even like apple but you are so incredibly wrong it’s laughable. This might have been true 20 years ago but dude. Apple is huge and it’s personal computing is huge too.
I would venture to say that it was iPod + iTunes that brought Apple back, and then iPhone was just the icing at exactly the right time (Nokia was also prototyping "internet tablets", albeit with resistive touch screens).
They did make the most of it, and they are definitely the show-off market leader (when you want to show off your laptop, that's what you get ;).
My company recently got me a MacBook Pro 14, and while it's fast, I don't enjoy using it for the same reasons I hated my old XPS13: I hate the keyboard and glossiness of the screen (and sharp edges too). I am a Thinkpad X1 guy, those are machines I happily go back to.
I don't think that's necessarily true. There were many millions of people using Macs and many of them were intensely, religiously loyal to Apple, regardless of the technically (de)merits of the system. Launching a new OS as an upgrade to that massive install base is very different than trying to take a high-end workstation and turn it into a mass market product. And it's an interesting question how much that pre-existing Apple user base was instrumental to the success of the iPod.
Of course it matters, as NeXT was nearly out of business by the time Apple bought it. All of their hardware products had failed and their attempt as a cross platform SDK, OpenStep, was barely holding on. Their only successful product was WebObjects (which Apple quickly destroyed) and even that was fairly limited. Without being part of a billion dollar corporation it's unlikely Jobs could've funded his ideas from his personal fortune. I also think it's unlikely he could've done what he did at a Apple at a company where he had fewer checks on his impulses, as his time at NeXT proves.
WebObjects port to Java was still done under NeXT's umbrella, and it was initially used for the store (no idea what powers it nowadays), and even then its fate was sealed under Steve's management.
By the time apple acquired them, their board had long abandoned the idea of being a hardware manufacturer due to collosal financial losses. The next hardware is cool to look at in retrospect but was very expensive and sold poorly. After 1995 or so next was in no financial state to design and ship any new hardware.
historically and in the bigger picture of things, yes, but in the late 1990s by the time that it came to NeXT getting acquired by apple, their hardware was long since irrelevant.
You should look up the history. At that time they basically were a software company and not very successful either. Without being bought by Apple its likely they would have died.
Its actually kind of crazy how high NEXT got valued.
My graduation thesis was porting a particle engine my supervisor originally developed on NeXT, from Objective-C into C++/Windows/OpenGL, as means to carry on further research on it.
The Cube where it was originally developed, was lying on a corner on his office as no one believed it had any future left.
Around this time in 1995 or so OpenSTEP was running pretty well on Sun hardware but Sun management were busy fighting turf wars with each other to the point of completely dropping the ball on the project and just letting it go. So the more interesting question is what would have happened if Sun had bought NeXT or OpenSTEP from NeXT. They had great hardware and big company power back then.
The iPod had some software involvement, but was almost entirely a hardware play. It used an unusually capable small hard drive that Apple bought all of and in the early versions made use of Firewire for ease of use and quick transfers. All of the software for controlling it was contracted out to a company outside Apple that specialized in embedded applications which are really different from applications on home computers or workstations.
I honestly wouldn't want Sun to adopt OpenSTEP. Building your whole user space on Objectiv C is a pretty bad idea in my opinion. But then again, not like they had anything much better. It had gotten a large amount of work but Im not sure if I am Sun at that point, I would want to make it my default.
In 1996 Sun bought Lighthouse Design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design), a NeXT software house, and then largely abandoned it when Sun went all in on Java. I don't think a Sun acquisition of NeXT (either just the technology or the entire company) would have went well for the future of NeXT given Sun's commitment to Java during the rest of the 1990's.
I don't think Jobs could have done much with Sun, or much more with NeXT, which had pretty much run out of road by then.
Sun was professional, Jobs was consumer. Jobs needed to be top dog and in charge of concept, and he couldn't have done that at Sun. He also needed some constraints and consumer focus, which Apple provided.
NeXT was basically a vanity project. It was poorly run from a business POV, but developed some decent tech. The real primary motivation wasn't to make money, it was to keep some attention on Jobs and maintain his profile as an Important Innovative Person.
Sun was engineering-led not image-led and wedded to workstation/server. That market turned out to be a relatively short-lived spasm - a legacy of the mini market pioneered by DEC - in a much longer consumer-oriented tech history.
So there was an impossible tension there.
It might have worked if Apple had remained a completely independent division and Jobs had been given a free hand to run it. But that was never really remotely likely.
It might also have worked if Jobs had any interest in the server/business market. But he really didn't - possibly because it was "boring" and not mass market, which meant less attention and praise for him.
Quite a bit of Sun software engineering ended up at Google so you're not wrong. Especially after Oracle shut down all Sun software development and laid everyone off in 2017 there was a huge wave of referral hiring.
Eric Schmidt was the CTO of Sun for a while and brought that culture to Google. I see a lot of the problems Sun had in Google and IMHO it's about to collapse under its own weight and lack of focus.
A lot of people at the time thought Google should have bought Sun. Google was heavily involved in Java at the time (with Dalvik especially), and got in a lot of trouble with Oracle when they bought Sun.
I worked at EMC at the time that Sun was aquired by Oracle. There were rumors that EMC was considering purchasing Sun to gain the final toe hold in the DC that they eventually filled by merging with Dell.
I am sure if EMC had bought Sun I'd still be there. Sun & EMC were both engineer led organisations in the old days, and the two cultures would have worked well together. (IMHO based on my experience working at EMC and with many many Sun alumni).
> Sun & EMC were both engineer led organisations in the old days
Isn't that exactly the problem? Server and storage HW were rapidly getting commodified. That's why the "vacuum cleaner salespeople" of the IT world (Dell, Compaq etc.) won, there's little value add in server HW engineering except at the bottom of the stack (Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, etc.).
Thats a little harsh towards Compaq. They inherited industry leadership with the 386 and their stewardship of the PC in that time was pretty damn good. Dell, the cow people etc...not so much.
It's also why HP, the actual engineer led scientific instrument manufacturer HP, left the computer industry and became Agilent leaving the vacuum cleaner sales people part behind. It's a crying shame, but you're right, PC manufacturers were and still are in a brutal race to the bottom.
For a while I though HP might have a chance on mobile, when they took on webOS. If they could have established a compelling platform stack with hardware, operating system and a decent dev environment they could have had a chance to grow their margins a bit. The problem is I suspect the PC side of HP just wasn't up to it. I had an HP digital camera around that time and it was a bulky, blocky uninspiring lump of a device.
Well, too bad IBM withdraw their offer, and if anyone thinks that they would care more about Solaris than Aix, IBM i or IBM z/OS, they are fooling themselves.
Databases they already had DB2. Informix did not had an happy life after aquisition, so most likely the love for MySQL wouldn't be that great.
And in what concerns Java, IBM has always had their own implementations, with extensions like JIT caches, AOT compilation, real time GC, special flavour of value types (ObjectLayout), so also here little value to get from Sun.
IBM would have continued Solaris development, maybe not made a major investment in it but would also not have destroyed it. They would have continued to develop it and ZFS in the open.
I simply don't see IBM doing what Oracle did and basically stopping OpenSource development.
And its not wishful thinking at all. Solaris development was happening in public it was well integrated with the community its not at all crazy to think that at least part of the development team would have continued working in the same way.
There were good products build on top of Solaris technology that IBM would have continue to develop and sell. Those products would not easily be built on top of AIX anytime soon.
IBM didn't need ANOTHER proprietary Unix, why would they go the Oracle route and make it proprietary again? What possible reason would IBM have to do that? The Openness of Solaris was what made it different form their other offerings.
IBM had also invested quite a bit of money in Linux and RedHat is literally part of IBM now. And apparently they have not acted the same as Oracle.
> IBM withdraw their offer, because they didn't had any commercial reason to go forward with the deal, and they aren't a charity to start with.
I kinda wonder what IBM really is these days anyway.
They're a bit of a server manufacturer for some niche stuff. A bit of a CPU manufacturer for some niche uses. A bit of a consultancy operator. A bit of a software supplier. A bit of an operational outsourcer.
They're dabbling in everything yet don't shine at anything. No clear focus. If they didn't have their name and legacy I bet they would have been lost in the waves long ago.
They're an integrator and consultancy with a first-party mainframe platform, first-party data center play, first-party Linux development and support subsidiary, and the core developers for a lot of current-generation automation tooling.
I understand why IBM didn't buy Sun that's not what we are arguing about.
Sun was selling products that could only work on top of Solaris. Had IBM bought Sun they would have continued to sell those products (as they were profitable) and likely continue at least some level of Solaris development to support those products.
They would have a had no reason what so ever to make that further development proprietary.
> tamed C into production
I have no idea what that even means. See has been successful in production on literally millions of computers and server around the world.
And if we are talking about usefulness to production Zones and DTrace are about 1000x more helpful then anything Oracle innovated.
> Something that naturally the Oracle haters don't care about.
Yeah people don't tend to care as much what happens in proprietary OS by shitty vendors.
Memory tagging isn't remotely new, LISP Maschines and many others had done it before. So by that count they didn't invent anything.
The code for it isn't even public so other could learn for it as Oracle made Solaris proprietary again.
> IBM invented timesharing and containers, no need for Solaris stuff.
I'm not sure what you are referring to by containers here. Please tell me where I can find a non-property Unix that allows me to use these amazing IBM containers.
You seem to place equal value on some proprietary system that people can't actually use, and those that made it available to everybody in Open Source.
Call me crazy but I value innovations more that are in the open and available.
IBM has Eclipse. Not only is it an underhanded offense towards Sun, but IBM has shown that they are not willing to push the software to its best possible state.
Eclipse is nice but JetBrains' products and Visual Studio Code are nicer.
IBM is struggling with cloud computing. Adding SUN, they would have tried to turn it into a SPARK offer and burned much more resources.
Both SUN and IBM couldn't continue as before. How could IBM have used SUN to create something better?
At SUN's scale, there was no way forward for their OS or their chips. They were too late in open sourcing their OS, which could have created the market for their chips. Oracle did what SUN's management should have done years before.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs chose to build consumer products because that brings the scale to produce chips. It's in IBM's name to serve businesses, not consumers. The cultural change to create the foundation for SUN's hardware business is almost impossible to pull off.
I would like to argue that the world is a better place because Oracle is maintaining Java, something that SUN didn't fully achieve.
Instead of browsers and Javascript, we could have a jvm everywhere. We are building the full stack with technologies like react and virtual DOMs anyway. It's too late for that, but it's in Oracle's own interest to make Java shine.
What you get is 'Taligent'. A partnership between Apple/IBM in 1992.
> Taligent OS and CommonPoint mirrored the sprawling scope of IBM's complementary Workplace OS, in redundantly overlapping attempts to become the ultimate universal system to unify all of the world's computers and operating systems with a single microkernel.
Apparently it a combination of 'Talented' and 'Intelligent'. So what you get apparently is the worst aspect of both organization.
Its like if you would have Sun and Apple merge and you end up building a Sun GUI on top of a System 7 kernel.
> August 10, 1997: Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced yesterday that it has completed the acquisition of Apple Computers
> November 8, 1997: Apple released a new version of the Macintosh personal computer yesterday … the MacUltra is powered by a 300 MHz UltraSPARC II microprocessor. The MacUltra is shipped with the “Macintosh Solaris” operating system – a version of Sun’s Solaris OS with a classic Mac OS-derived desktop environment and full compatibility with classic Mac OS application
In 3 Months they switched architectures, integrated a DE on top of a new OS, and wrote an emulator for a new architecture. Impressive.
Way too mainstream. Imagine Pomegrenade running on up to 4x4 Ross-Cypress-Fujitsu asynchronous CryoSparx, consisting of Suns (Hyper?)News-thing with seamless classic Mac OS integration, that ADB/Localtalk stuff for periphery, and so on.
Sun might've shed the Newton, but I suspect they would've had their own vision for networked mobile handhelds or otherwise very portable devices.
For consumer mobile in 1996, maybe they'd think more like Internet-connected handhelds based on HotJava (Web browser with Java-based content handlers installed on-the-fly, in this case partly for networking efficiency, partly disconnected operation, partly promotng their vision of Web). While also making compatible HotJava browser available for all the popular desktop platforms. (And JavaScript never took over.)
But for corporate IT customers, they might still push more their your-desktop-everywhere thin client ideas, of course served by Sun servers in the data centers. But also based on Java.
Ex-Sun guy. Sun was terrible at mergers and bought/killed products on a regular basis. The culture difference between Apple/Sun is so big... There's absolutely no way this would have worked. I would have loved to have a proper Sparc. Those machines were amazing and their UI/UX sucked so bad. Sun never found an opportunity it couldn't botch.
A sad example of a Sun acquisition that went nowhere was Lighthouse Design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design), a software company that specialized in productivity software for NeXTSTEP. One of the company's most famous products was Concurrence, a presentation tool that Steve Jobs used and influenced the design of Apple Keynote. In an alternative timeline, Lighthouse Design could have been the premier developer for Mac OS X.
Sun bought Lighthouse Design at a time when it invested in NeXT's OpenStep API; in fact, there was a port of OpenStep to Solaris. However, Java ended up taking off around 1995-96, and Sun's strategy changed from supporting OpenStep to promoting Java. Lighthouse Design's software didn't fit in this strategy, and sadly the software has been abandoned, even though Sun was in a great position to polish and update the software when Mac OS X was released.
I understand why Lighthouse Design was sold, though. Before Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, the future for NeXT-based software companies appeared bleak, and these companies faced the challenging prospects of (1) porting their software, implemented using NeXT's then state-of-the-art APIs and tools, to platforms that were more commercially viable yet lacked such tooling, and (2) competing with the 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft; WordPerfect, Lotus, and Claris tried but to no avail; how was Lighthouse Design going to compete against Microsoft? Being a productivity software company was tough in the 1990s; if you targeted mainstream platforms (Mac and Windows) then you had to compete against Microsoft, and if you targeted non-mainstream platforms (OS/2, NeXTSTEP, BeOS), then while you're shielded from competing against Microsoft Office, you're gambling on the success of these platforms (and had these platforms became commercially widespread, Microsoft would have just ported Office to them, anyway).
I’ve been loving the 90’s computing nostalgia theme on HN lately - keep it coming.
Sun are obviously best known for their Sparc systems, but their x86 workstations were beautiful and well ahead of their time in terms of serviceability. The classic design would still look modern today.
Oh wow, didn't know these were a thing! They look great, now I kinda want one, haha.
Though I wonder, who bought these over similar Dell/HP/etc boxes? Did they have any special features or was it mostly just about them running Solaris first-party?
Jobs was never interested in Server and that where Sun could have made the most bank looking back at it from now. Sun would have been a natural as cloud company and a x86 server and NAS vendor.
They tried and failed, the dotcom bust did them in, there was so much sparc hardware on the 2nd hand market it killed their server business for a while. Their x86 servers were never as good as HP/Compaq and a lot of their ancillary hardware like tape backup was rebadged from HP.
When servers got going again, price became absolutely key and Linux had become so good it made solaris seem like yesterdays news.
I do like this alternative timeline, but if Apple went Solaris it wouldn't have surprised me if Microsoft did a linux distro in the early 2000s which would have really made for a strange future.
> Their x86 servers were never as good as HP/Compaq
Some of their x86 AMD server were pretty good.
> When servers got going again, price became absolutely key and Linux had become so good it made solaris seem like yesterdays news.
Technically this is very questionable. I would argue Solaris was way ahead at that point.
> I do like this alternative timeline, but if Apple went Solaris it wouldn't have surprised me if Microsoft did a linux distro in the early 2000s which would have really made for a strange future.
Solaris was technically better, no question, but linux got "good enough" and for most customers that put expensuve Sun licences out of the question.
Back then, Microsoft saw sun as a major competitor, I don't think its out of the question they would have tried selling Unix again. They did in the 1980s.
In my mind Solaris was Open in mid-2000s but now looking it up it was only in the later 2000s when it opened up. Yeah, it would have need to be Open.
> Back then, Microsoft saw sun as a major competitor, I don't think its out of the question they would have tried selling Unix again. They did in the 1980s.
I don't really see it. The competition was mostly in the server space. If Microsoft wanted to adopt UNIX to compete why would Sun buying Apple have change anything?
Those companies are so different and by that point it was a bit late. Its more likely that they both would have gone bankrupt in 2000. Apple did seriously consider moving to Solaris by the late 90s, had Solaris been Open by then they very likely would have.
I think maybe in the early 90s if Sun had adopted SPARC instead of PowerPC and changed to Salaris giving Sun a real "PC" division. That would have been more sensible.
The more interesting possibility (and more realistic) would have been a merger with SGI. Together maybe they could have both done better. I think had this been done in the 90s putting together the best from Solaris and IRIX (and hopefully Open Source) combined with push for x86 Solaris on PC compatible.
Or more if you want to be really aggressive try to create a lower cost SPARC 'Home Workstation'. Taking on Wintel before Windows 95 might have been possible. Even if only far a small part of a big market.
In 1993, Sears exited the mail order business. In 1994, Amazon was founded.
It might have been different. Sears already owned Prodigy. The World Wide Web already existed in the early 1990s. PCs had been available for over 10 years. Modems had reached 28Kb/s. What if Sears had simply put their huge catalog on line and started taking orders? Sears already had the logistics infrastructure for deliveries.
Where prodigy failed was not pivoting from its walled garden custom binary app of content to a general purpose dialup ISP. By the time they thought to to do it, it was late 1996 or early 97 and plenty of other generalists were in the market (netcom, mind spring, etc)
Who knows what might have happened if they'd brought all of sears products online for purchase, in their existing standalone prodigy browser software...
I don’t know how Sears failed so hard. I worked for them as a frontline sales rep at the turn of the century. I’d love to hear a story from the bigwigs.
The POS system was archaic, even at that time. Nobody trusted inventory counts, it was never accurate. But the website was always worse. Plus we had no workable access to it. It took an eternity to load a page. And what you saw was worthless. Sears treated the website with contempt.
We had a mandatory company wide meeting on a Sunday night. They played a pre recorded message from the CEO telling us how important family was to the company. He was at home with his family. We weren’t. That never registered with Sears.
My job at the time was ostensibly to sell hand tools, or lawn tools, or consumer electronics. But that wasn’t the point at all. We got paid commission. The item was nothing. Maybe 3%, probably less. A few dollars. But a successful Sears card signup? That was a flat $20.00 payout. Add on a warranty? 30% commission on the warranty. Bonuses were paid to management based on the ratio of sales with addons. So for a sales rep like me we will take any sale. But my boss would prefer I not sell a TV at all if I don’t get the warranty.
Sears was a predatory business for decades. I don’t know when they lost their way but it was long before the turn of the century. Modern business would do well to study how Sears failed.
My TLDR opinion: The MBAs squeezed all the value out for shareholders and short term profits once again. Cut every cost to the bone, sell everything not bolted down until the end. It only took as long as it did for Sears because of brand and brick and mortar inertia.
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Inventory counts: have to do 'inventory' (check what's really there), which costs workers and time to verify. Most frequently seen by consumers when a store thinks they have X of something but they really have N (likely zero).
POS: Infrastructure is a cost center... How do you measure the hypothetical losses?
Saturday... video message? WTF kind of cult is this BS?
Maligned incentives. I'm sure ages ago those metrics used to be useful for promotion or something, then they became the literal payment system. No wonder that place felt like a used car showroom for merchandise as they were going out of business.
Go a layer deeper, and it’s simple psychology. By the time sears entered their decline, everyone working there was not only born after the founding of sears, but their parents were, and likely their parents too. Sears was a fixture, an eternal company, “too big to fail” - reified. That attitude is, again and again, the crux of the failure of long-lived organisations and institutions of every flavour from private companies to dynastic families to nation states.
> Saturday... video message? WTF kind of cult is this BS?
Sunday. The store closed an hour or two early on Sundays. They had the whole staff come in at 7pm, even if it was our day off.
It was around the time of the Kmart merger so could have been about that. The only thing I recall now was the CEO telling us how important "family" time was, while my dinner got cold at home. Of course "Sears is a family" or somesuch. So yeah, a cult, at least in the c-suite.
and proceeds to describe exactly why it failed so hard.
BTW, despite all that corporate bullshit one thing should work reliably: inventory. When a customer is physically in the store you can "sorry, actually we don't have $thing in stock" all you want, they can't just teleport to your competitor. In the Internet - they can.
I was going to comment the same, but I think the question was one layer up from that: Yes, they failed because of terrible tooling, tone-deaf management, and awful incentives. But why were those problems happening? The tooling problem should have been obvious to anyone even passingly involved with on-the-ground operations (and lower managers should have bubbled that up), management should have seen how they looked, the incentives should have been so obviously cancerous that they should never have been let out the door. So why did the company behave in ways that appear to have been dumb even at the time?
Sears was "too big to fail", an "American Institution", Sears catalogs were used as toilet paper in the old west (once you had bought your year's supply of ammunition, a new home to build, canning supplies and seeds).
It may have felt like they could do no wrong so why focus on continuing to do right? Why push for excellence when you're already the best?
And once one manager started thinking like that, then another did, and another did, and another...
It's easy to see in the aftermath what factors caused them to fail, but the spirit of the event itself was plain to everyone not caught up in it.
They thought they were invulnerable, and like a teenager wearing a t-shirt on a motorcycle they eventually found out the hard truth.
Sounds like standard retail in the 90's. The place I worked at had percentages you needed to meet for service plans and accessories. We were told to push 4 ink cartridges and photo and regular paper with every printer. Don't forget your gold plated parallel cable! The biggest sellers got promoted to department leads and then assistant store manager.
Amazon isn't anything different. You're bombarded with offers to sign up for the Amazon Visa, "Get $50 off with approval of the Amazon Rewards Visa". They try to sneak in the Asurion warranty. 'Customers who bought this item also bought...' is where they push the high-margin accessories.
They don't make any money on the big items. Nobody ever did. It's the service an accessories.
Having worked on the logistics side at Amazon and having some inside into classic mail order, I think mail order tranasferred much harder to eCommerce than most people think. It starts with order entry (mail vs. automatic digital solutions linked to fulfillment), covers prices and catalog updates (real time vs. once every couple.of months, again integrated into fulfillment) and everything im between.
> It starts with order entry (mail vs. automatic digital solutions linked to fulfillment), covers prices and catalog updates (real time vs. once every couple.of months, again integrated into fulfillment) and everything im between.
This is all easy and achievable, should you pursue the path. Incremental improvements onto an existing, ancient, paper-oriented business process are easily possible.
- Print off online orders as facsimile mail-in orders for processing
- Prices weren't fancy real-time updates back then, or didn't have to be if they were
You're looking at the state of today and assuming this is as it was on the nascent web.
In about 1985 Sears piloted a thing called "Electronistore." You could go into a Sears store and browse the catalog and place orders on a computer (a PC/XT) with a credit card.
The computer setup was very creative. At the time, a PC couldn't really display high quality photos, and there wasn't hard drive capacity for the photos of the Sears catalog anyhow. The solution was to make each product photo a frame on a Laserdisc. The computer was connected to a TV/Monitor that could be electronically commanded to switch inputs between the computer and the laserdisc player. The computer could command the laserdisc player to seek to a certain frame and freeze the frame.
You could browse and search the catalog, and then hit a button and it would show you the picture, then you'd hit another key and go back to the text interface for ordering.
Anyhow they ran the pilot and not too many people used it since you could just use the catalog instead which had all of the same products, so they shut it down and never really returned to e-commerce.
I think the opposite might have actually happened. If Jonathan Schwartz hadn't pissed Steve off by talking to the press, macOS would have had ZFS and might ave acquired Sun.
During US v Microsoft, I was in the middle of writing a brief to the court arguing that the solution to Microsoft’s monopoly was not to split the OS from the application groups, but rather to disallow Microsoft from publishing its own compilers anymore. Because, you see, then they would be forced to have fully documented OS calling structures, because they would have to communicate them to the compiler vendors. In spite of their weakened state at the time, IBM would have gladly bought Microsoft’s dev tools groups, dooming them thoroughly as they attempted to merge them into the VisualAge group (née CSet).
I always believed the net effect of this would be that Microsoft would suddenly have to do an about face and support one of the OSS compiler chains, probably GCC. At the time, they had a current Mach-compiled version of Windows that was still being maintained, and odds are Windows—not MacOS—would have been the ascendant Mach-based OS, because MS would have lost a lot of its ability to fix its problems by losing control of its dev chain. They’d need more radical abstraction than the NT kernel was giving them at the time. Because it was still a branch from OS/2 1.2 which was… special and half-baked. (It’s important to remember that Linux was still considered a toy by most—the “serious” OSS OS was still BSD. And if you had real workloads you ran Solaris, even though you knew Sun was somehow going to doom themselves. The world then looks nothing like the world now.)
This really would have obviated the need for Apple to sell to Sun. Instead, MS would never have made the rescue investment, Sun would continue to skitter off the rails, and Apple would have sold to… I dunno, probably someone weird like Sony. Remember them? Because MS going to Mach would have poisoned the shift from Copeland to NeXTStep… the world barely wanted one Mach-based OS, much less two. One neat side effect, though, is we would have probably seen something a lot like WSL back in 2000 or so. Because the Mach Win build took much more advantage of the OS “personalities” features than MacOS did.
Back then, all of this mattered a lot, because things were far less elegant than they are now. It’s hard to imagine how far we came in the intervening 25 years. So very far.
But in the middle of writing that brief, Judge Jackson shot his stupid mouth off, and I was like, “Welp, nobody’s getting split up now.” And I put it in my archive of good ideas that aren’t gonna happen.
So no, I don’t think there was ever a real scenario where Sun bought Apple.
Perhaps you could try reading the timeline's account of U.S. v. Microsoft, the three parts of which are present on the first and second pages of the link.
Another interesting question (to me at least), is what if Sun had made Solaris open source about 10 years earlier. I think there's a chance what is now Linux (and potentially Android as well) would have adopted the Solaris kernel.
The differences may not have been great to some, but I believe we may have been about 10 years ahead in the opensource OS game by now, since the Solaris kernel was such an advanced thing at the time, and with the thriving Linux community it could have really flourished...
Forget themes - I have successfully run actual CDE on my pinephone. It's a bit cramped (probably should play with the resolution and/or dpi), but it works. (This works because CDE is open source builds fine on aarch64. I forget if I used the AUR package on Arch Linux ARM or just did a git clone && ./configure && make && make install.)
Yeah I don't know that anyone's tested it on Alpine (or any musl system, actually), but it works fine on every GNU/Linux system I've tried. Also depending on when you last tried, it uses autoconf now so none of the weird `make World` stuff.
One thing I've learned over the years is how sales people are rewarded is important to the products a company decides to sell. It actually drives the product mix and constrains their choices about new markets or new approaches. Enterprise companies reward sales people on commission on large deals structured across hardware, software, support and services. Those companies are allergic to "retail" opportunities.
It suspect it would have been impossible for Sun to sell affordable computers individually or in low quantities because no sales person would have been compensated. Most people wonder why "great technology" dies at the hands of corporate overlords. I don't. I look at where the incentives lie and if they lie on big deals in an industry that's becoming commoditized, that company is likely toast.
Why doesn't the business change to accommodate lower cost, commodity systems or servers? Even in the late 1990's the writing was on the wall. For years as SGI came out with more $40,000+ workstations competing with $10,000 high end x86? Why did Sun push our company in 2000/2001 to buy (relatively mediocre) preforming SPARC $75,000 servers when the industry was clearly moving to commodity x86/64 at $20,000?
The high prices lead to bigger deals and more commission. I was briefly the beneficiary of the Sun startup program and we bought some Sun x86 hardware at reduced rates. Without that program, I would not have been able to afford what was well designed and good quality hardware. I would simply have gone for DELL x86. I was also a Sun reseller for a while, and it was always about the packaged deal.
The sales people have an incredible amount of sway. After all, with no money coming in, you don't last long. (For normal companies - zero revenue unicorns make no sense to me). They will actively undermine any effort to change the situation. They will ridicule and belittle the new technology. But they're sales people and not technologists or developers.
It's like watching the dinosaurs make fun of the asteroid. (What a big, dumb rock!) They would rather have yet another bad sales quarter in an endless string of bad sales quarters than attack their compensation. It's especially fun when it's the end of the quarter and you finally get the call from a sales rep. They're desperate to meet their quota so they'll make a deal on your pathetically small order. They idea that a customer could get on a website and just buy the product at a reasonable cost without having to have a sales meeting to upsell them on another batch services, is incomprehensible to them.
Had Sun bought Apple? It would have been some vaporware product announcements until they realized their sales people weren't interested, sold off any assets of value, and shoved the rest of it in a warehouse as IP. They would go back to trying to hold the line against pesky cheap PCs (which aren't real workstations) and x86 servers (which aren't real servers).
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadI'm not sure it matters if Sun buys Apple. Jobs probably ends up taking NeXT in the direction he took Apple upon return.
Steve Jobs is the key to a lot of stuff and the revolution in personal and consumer computing in the 2000's. I don't think it matters what company he does that under.
When I visit any of my 3 kids on their respect campuses. I see the same. Some times even stronger.
I spent time in Boston 2 weeks ago and rode the tubes a lot. I saw a LOT of MacBooks. Way more than all other laptops combined.
I don’t even like apple but you are so incredibly wrong it’s laughable. This might have been true 20 years ago but dude. Apple is huge and it’s personal computing is huge too.
They did make the most of it, and they are definitely the show-off market leader (when you want to show off your laptop, that's what you get ;).
My company recently got me a MacBook Pro 14, and while it's fast, I don't enjoy using it for the same reasons I hated my old XPS13: I hate the keyboard and glossiness of the screen (and sharp edges too). I am a Thinkpad X1 guy, those are machines I happily go back to.
I forget his exact words :-)
NeXT was a pure software company and not a successful one either. The idea that they could start doing things like iPod is pretty out there.
The iconic NeXT cube (and NeXTStations) would disagree with you there.
Its actually kind of crazy how high NEXT got valued.
Despite not being successful, they were well known for their hardware.
The Cube where it was originally developed, was lying on a corner on his office as no one believed it had any future left.
The iPod had some software involvement, but was almost entirely a hardware play. It used an unusually capable small hard drive that Apple bought all of and in the early versions made use of Firewire for ease of use and quick transfers. All of the software for controlling it was contracted out to a company outside Apple that specialized in embedded applications which are really different from applications on home computers or workstations.
Sun was professional, Jobs was consumer. Jobs needed to be top dog and in charge of concept, and he couldn't have done that at Sun. He also needed some constraints and consumer focus, which Apple provided.
NeXT was basically a vanity project. It was poorly run from a business POV, but developed some decent tech. The real primary motivation wasn't to make money, it was to keep some attention on Jobs and maintain his profile as an Important Innovative Person.
Sun was engineering-led not image-led and wedded to workstation/server. That market turned out to be a relatively short-lived spasm - a legacy of the mini market pioneered by DEC - in a much longer consumer-oriented tech history.
So there was an impossible tension there.
It might have worked if Apple had remained a completely independent division and Jobs had been given a free hand to run it. But that was never really remotely likely.
It might also have worked if Jobs had any interest in the server/business market. But he really didn't - possibly because it was "boring" and not mass market, which meant less attention and praise for him.
But the world would have been a better place if IBM had bought Sun instead of Oracle.
Which bring me to this old joke:
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
I am sure if EMC had bought Sun I'd still be there. Sun & EMC were both engineer led organisations in the old days, and the two cultures would have worked well together. (IMHO based on my experience working at EMC and with many many Sun alumni).
Isn't that exactly the problem? Server and storage HW were rapidly getting commodified. That's why the "vacuum cleaner salespeople" of the IT world (Dell, Compaq etc.) won, there's little value add in server HW engineering except at the bottom of the stack (Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, etc.).
For a while I though HP might have a chance on mobile, when they took on webOS. If they could have established a compelling platform stack with hardware, operating system and a decent dev environment they could have had a chance to grow their margins a bit. The problem is I suspect the PC side of HP just wasn't up to it. I had an HP digital camera around that time and it was a bulky, blocky uninspiring lump of a device.
Databases they already had DB2. Informix did not had an happy life after aquisition, so most likely the love for MySQL wouldn't be that great.
And in what concerns Java, IBM has always had their own implementations, with extensions like JIT caches, AOT compilation, real time GC, special flavour of value types (ObjectLayout), so also here little value to get from Sun.
I simply don't see IBM doing what Oracle did and basically stopping OpenSource development.
Maybe you should delve into how much FOSS love there is on IBM when it doesn't fit business targets.
Wishful thinking.
And its not wishful thinking at all. Solaris development was happening in public it was well integrated with the community its not at all crazy to think that at least part of the development team would have continued working in the same way.
There were good products build on top of Solaris technology that IBM would have continue to develop and sell. Those products would not easily be built on top of AIX anytime soon.
IBM didn't need ANOTHER proprietary Unix, why would they go the Oracle route and make it proprietary again? What possible reason would IBM have to do that? The Openness of Solaris was what made it different form their other offerings.
IBM had also invested quite a bit of money in Linux and RedHat is literally part of IBM now. And apparently they have not acted the same as Oracle.
IBM withdraw their offer, because they didn't had any commercial reason to go forward with the deal, and they aren't a charity to start with.
Also interestingly, it was Oracle that turned Solaris into the first commercial UNIX that has successfully tamed C into production, not Sun.
Something that naturally the Oracle haters don't care about.
I kinda wonder what IBM really is these days anyway.
They're a bit of a server manufacturer for some niche stuff. A bit of a CPU manufacturer for some niche uses. A bit of a consultancy operator. A bit of a software supplier. A bit of an operational outsourcer.
They're dabbling in everything yet don't shine at anything. No clear focus. If they didn't have their name and legacy I bet they would have been lost in the waves long ago.
Sun was selling products that could only work on top of Solaris. Had IBM bought Sun they would have continued to sell those products (as they were profitable) and likely continue at least some level of Solaris development to support those products.
They would have a had no reason what so ever to make that further development proprietary.
> tamed C into production
I have no idea what that even means. See has been successful in production on literally millions of computers and server around the world.
And if we are talking about usefulness to production Zones and DTrace are about 1000x more helpful then anything Oracle innovated.
> Something that naturally the Oracle haters don't care about.
Yeah people don't tend to care as much what happens in proprietary OS by shitty vendors.
IBM invented timesharing and containers, no need for Solaris stuff.
The code for it isn't even public so other could learn for it as Oracle made Solaris proprietary again.
> IBM invented timesharing and containers, no need for Solaris stuff.
I'm not sure what you are referring to by containers here. Please tell me where I can find a non-property Unix that allows me to use these amazing IBM containers.
You seem to place equal value on some proprietary system that people can't actually use, and those that made it available to everybody in Open Source.
Call me crazy but I value innovations more that are in the open and available.
Something where Apple, Google and Microsoft are followers, with ARM MTE, PAC and Pluton, while Intel just borked their n attempt at it.
You can educate yourself on AIX LPAR and System 360.
Yes, I do place equal value in commercial stuff, my FOSS zealot days are a behind me, https://xkcd.com/2347/
IBM is struggling with cloud computing. Adding SUN, they would have tried to turn it into a SPARK offer and burned much more resources.
Both SUN and IBM couldn't continue as before. How could IBM have used SUN to create something better?
At SUN's scale, there was no way forward for their OS or their chips. They were too late in open sourcing their OS, which could have created the market for their chips. Oracle did what SUN's management should have done years before.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs chose to build consumer products because that brings the scale to produce chips. It's in IBM's name to serve businesses, not consumers. The cultural change to create the foundation for SUN's hardware business is almost impossible to pull off.
I would like to argue that the world is a better place because Oracle is maintaining Java, something that SUN didn't fully achieve.
Instead of browsers and Javascript, we could have a jvm everywhere. We are building the full stack with technologies like react and virtual DOMs anyway. It's too late for that, but it's in Oracle's own interest to make Java shine.
> Taligent OS and CommonPoint mirrored the sprawling scope of IBM's complementary Workplace OS, in redundantly overlapping attempts to become the ultimate universal system to unify all of the world's computers and operating systems with a single microkernel.
Apparently it a combination of 'Talented' and 'Intelligent'. So what you get apparently is the worst aspect of both organization.
Its like if you would have Sun and Apple merge and you end up building a Sun GUI on top of a System 7 kernel.
> November 8, 1997: Apple released a new version of the Macintosh personal computer yesterday … the MacUltra is powered by a 300 MHz UltraSPARC II microprocessor. The MacUltra is shipped with the “Macintosh Solaris” operating system – a version of Sun’s Solaris OS with a classic Mac OS-derived desktop environment and full compatibility with classic Mac OS application
In 3 Months they switched architectures, integrated a DE on top of a new OS, and wrote an emulator for a new architecture. Impressive.
Steve declined.
About a decade later, Larry acquired Sun.
https://www.cio.com/article/238191/how-larry-ellison-plotted...
Imagine being sued by Apple because of some license condition :)
Trivia: Steve Jobs was Ellison's wedding photographer. Ellison trusted no one except Steve when it came to aesthetics.
For consumer mobile in 1996, maybe they'd think more like Internet-connected handhelds based on HotJava (Web browser with Java-based content handlers installed on-the-fly, in this case partly for networking efficiency, partly disconnected operation, partly promotng their vision of Web). While also making compatible HotJava browser available for all the popular desktop platforms. (And JavaScript never took over.)
But for corporate IT customers, they might still push more their your-desktop-everywhere thin client ideas, of course served by Sun servers in the data centers. But also based on Java.
If you look at the earliest versions of OSX it's NeXT with a macos9 skin on top of it. But it's recognizably NeXT.
Sun bought Lighthouse Design at a time when it invested in NeXT's OpenStep API; in fact, there was a port of OpenStep to Solaris. However, Java ended up taking off around 1995-96, and Sun's strategy changed from supporting OpenStep to promoting Java. Lighthouse Design's software didn't fit in this strategy, and sadly the software has been abandoned, even though Sun was in a great position to polish and update the software when Mac OS X was released.
I understand why Lighthouse Design was sold, though. Before Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, the future for NeXT-based software companies appeared bleak, and these companies faced the challenging prospects of (1) porting their software, implemented using NeXT's then state-of-the-art APIs and tools, to platforms that were more commercially viable yet lacked such tooling, and (2) competing with the 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft; WordPerfect, Lotus, and Claris tried but to no avail; how was Lighthouse Design going to compete against Microsoft? Being a productivity software company was tough in the 1990s; if you targeted mainstream platforms (Mac and Windows) then you had to compete against Microsoft, and if you targeted non-mainstream platforms (OS/2, NeXTSTEP, BeOS), then while you're shielded from competing against Microsoft Office, you're gambling on the success of these platforms (and had these platforms became commercially widespread, Microsoft would have just ported Office to them, anyway).
Sun are obviously best known for their Sparc systems, but their x86 workstations were beautiful and well ahead of their time in terms of serviceability. The classic design would still look modern today.
The Ultra 2x/4x series looked great: http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/ultra_20m2/
IMO the best implementation of the design came in the SPARC versions where the optical drive and IO were combined in to one 5.25" bay (e.g. Ultra 25, pg 4: http://archives.retrobridge.org/sun/system-handbook/3.4/Syst...).
Though I wonder, who bought these over similar Dell/HP/etc boxes? Did they have any special features or was it mostly just about them running Solaris first-party?
When servers got going again, price became absolutely key and Linux had become so good it made solaris seem like yesterdays news.
I do like this alternative timeline, but if Apple went Solaris it wouldn't have surprised me if Microsoft did a linux distro in the early 2000s which would have really made for a strange future.
Some of their x86 AMD server were pretty good.
> When servers got going again, price became absolutely key and Linux had become so good it made solaris seem like yesterdays news.
Technically this is very questionable. I would argue Solaris was way ahead at that point.
> I do like this alternative timeline, but if Apple went Solaris it wouldn't have surprised me if Microsoft did a linux distro in the early 2000s which would have really made for a strange future.
Not sure I understand that logic.
Back then, Microsoft saw sun as a major competitor, I don't think its out of the question they would have tried selling Unix again. They did in the 1980s.
> Back then, Microsoft saw sun as a major competitor, I don't think its out of the question they would have tried selling Unix again. They did in the 1980s.
I don't really see it. The competition was mostly in the server space. If Microsoft wanted to adopt UNIX to compete why would Sun buying Apple have change anything?
Did HP actually made any tape hardware themselves? At least with LTO my impression was what everyone just OEMed from Quanta.
I think maybe in the early 90s if Sun had adopted SPARC instead of PowerPC and changed to Salaris giving Sun a real "PC" division. That would have been more sensible.
The more interesting possibility (and more realistic) would have been a merger with SGI. Together maybe they could have both done better. I think had this been done in the 90s putting together the best from Solaris and IRIX (and hopefully Open Source) combined with push for x86 Solaris on PC compatible.
Or more if you want to be really aggressive try to create a lower cost SPARC 'Home Workstation'. Taking on Wintel before Windows 95 might have been possible. Even if only far a small part of a big market.
In 1993, Sears exited the mail order business. In 1994, Amazon was founded.
It might have been different. Sears already owned Prodigy. The World Wide Web already existed in the early 1990s. PCs had been available for over 10 years. Modems had reached 28Kb/s. What if Sears had simply put their huge catalog on line and started taking orders? Sears already had the logistics infrastructure for deliveries.
Amazon might never have launched.
Who knows what might have happened if they'd brought all of sears products online for purchase, in their existing standalone prodigy browser software...
The POS system was archaic, even at that time. Nobody trusted inventory counts, it was never accurate. But the website was always worse. Plus we had no workable access to it. It took an eternity to load a page. And what you saw was worthless. Sears treated the website with contempt.
We had a mandatory company wide meeting on a Sunday night. They played a pre recorded message from the CEO telling us how important family was to the company. He was at home with his family. We weren’t. That never registered with Sears.
My job at the time was ostensibly to sell hand tools, or lawn tools, or consumer electronics. But that wasn’t the point at all. We got paid commission. The item was nothing. Maybe 3%, probably less. A few dollars. But a successful Sears card signup? That was a flat $20.00 payout. Add on a warranty? 30% commission on the warranty. Bonuses were paid to management based on the ratio of sales with addons. So for a sales rep like me we will take any sale. But my boss would prefer I not sell a TV at all if I don’t get the warranty.
Sears was a predatory business for decades. I don’t know when they lost their way but it was long before the turn of the century. Modern business would do well to study how Sears failed.
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Inventory counts: have to do 'inventory' (check what's really there), which costs workers and time to verify. Most frequently seen by consumers when a store thinks they have X of something but they really have N (likely zero).
POS: Infrastructure is a cost center... How do you measure the hypothetical losses?
Saturday... video message? WTF kind of cult is this BS?
Maligned incentives. I'm sure ages ago those metrics used to be useful for promotion or something, then they became the literal payment system. No wonder that place felt like a used car showroom for merchandise as they were going out of business.
Sunday. The store closed an hour or two early on Sundays. They had the whole staff come in at 7pm, even if it was our day off.
It was around the time of the Kmart merger so could have been about that. The only thing I recall now was the CEO telling us how important "family" time was, while my dinner got cold at home. Of course "Sears is a family" or somesuch. So yeah, a cult, at least in the c-suite.
> I don’t know how Sears failed so hard
and proceeds to describe exactly why it failed so hard.
BTW, despite all that corporate bullshit one thing should work reliably: inventory. When a customer is physically in the store you can "sorry, actually we don't have $thing in stock" all you want, they can't just teleport to your competitor. In the Internet - they can.
It may have felt like they could do no wrong so why focus on continuing to do right? Why push for excellence when you're already the best?
And once one manager started thinking like that, then another did, and another did, and another...
It's easy to see in the aftermath what factors caused them to fail, but the spirit of the event itself was plain to everyone not caught up in it.
They thought they were invulnerable, and like a teenager wearing a t-shirt on a motorcycle they eventually found out the hard truth.
Amazon isn't anything different. You're bombarded with offers to sign up for the Amazon Visa, "Get $50 off with approval of the Amazon Rewards Visa". They try to sneak in the Asurion warranty. 'Customers who bought this item also bought...' is where they push the high-margin accessories.
They don't make any money on the big items. Nobody ever did. It's the service an accessories.
This is all easy and achievable, should you pursue the path. Incremental improvements onto an existing, ancient, paper-oriented business process are easily possible.
- Print off online orders as facsimile mail-in orders for processing - Prices weren't fancy real-time updates back then, or didn't have to be if they were
You're looking at the state of today and assuming this is as it was on the nascent web.
It wasn't.
Here is the 1986 christmas catalog
https://archive.org/details/1986-sears-christmas-wishbook-ca...
https://christmas.musetechnical.com/
In about 1985 Sears piloted a thing called "Electronistore." You could go into a Sears store and browse the catalog and place orders on a computer (a PC/XT) with a credit card.
The computer setup was very creative. At the time, a PC couldn't really display high quality photos, and there wasn't hard drive capacity for the photos of the Sears catalog anyhow. The solution was to make each product photo a frame on a Laserdisc. The computer was connected to a TV/Monitor that could be electronically commanded to switch inputs between the computer and the laserdisc player. The computer could command the laserdisc player to seek to a certain frame and freeze the frame.
You could browse and search the catalog, and then hit a button and it would show you the picture, then you'd hit another key and go back to the text interface for ordering.
Anyhow they ran the pilot and not too many people used it since you could just use the catalog instead which had all of the same products, so they shut it down and never really returned to e-commerce.
(article about it from the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20201112020112/https://www.chica...)
I always believed the net effect of this would be that Microsoft would suddenly have to do an about face and support one of the OSS compiler chains, probably GCC. At the time, they had a current Mach-compiled version of Windows that was still being maintained, and odds are Windows—not MacOS—would have been the ascendant Mach-based OS, because MS would have lost a lot of its ability to fix its problems by losing control of its dev chain. They’d need more radical abstraction than the NT kernel was giving them at the time. Because it was still a branch from OS/2 1.2 which was… special and half-baked. (It’s important to remember that Linux was still considered a toy by most—the “serious” OSS OS was still BSD. And if you had real workloads you ran Solaris, even though you knew Sun was somehow going to doom themselves. The world then looks nothing like the world now.)
This really would have obviated the need for Apple to sell to Sun. Instead, MS would never have made the rescue investment, Sun would continue to skitter off the rails, and Apple would have sold to… I dunno, probably someone weird like Sony. Remember them? Because MS going to Mach would have poisoned the shift from Copeland to NeXTStep… the world barely wanted one Mach-based OS, much less two. One neat side effect, though, is we would have probably seen something a lot like WSL back in 2000 or so. Because the Mach Win build took much more advantage of the OS “personalities” features than MacOS did.
Back then, all of this mattered a lot, because things were far less elegant than they are now. It’s hard to imagine how far we came in the intervening 25 years. So very far.
But in the middle of writing that brief, Judge Jackson shot his stupid mouth off, and I was like, “Welp, nobody’s getting split up now.” And I put it in my archive of good ideas that aren’t gonna happen.
So no, I don’t think there was ever a real scenario where Sun bought Apple.
It suspect it would have been impossible for Sun to sell affordable computers individually or in low quantities because no sales person would have been compensated. Most people wonder why "great technology" dies at the hands of corporate overlords. I don't. I look at where the incentives lie and if they lie on big deals in an industry that's becoming commoditized, that company is likely toast.
Why doesn't the business change to accommodate lower cost, commodity systems or servers? Even in the late 1990's the writing was on the wall. For years as SGI came out with more $40,000+ workstations competing with $10,000 high end x86? Why did Sun push our company in 2000/2001 to buy (relatively mediocre) preforming SPARC $75,000 servers when the industry was clearly moving to commodity x86/64 at $20,000?
The high prices lead to bigger deals and more commission. I was briefly the beneficiary of the Sun startup program and we bought some Sun x86 hardware at reduced rates. Without that program, I would not have been able to afford what was well designed and good quality hardware. I would simply have gone for DELL x86. I was also a Sun reseller for a while, and it was always about the packaged deal.
The sales people have an incredible amount of sway. After all, with no money coming in, you don't last long. (For normal companies - zero revenue unicorns make no sense to me). They will actively undermine any effort to change the situation. They will ridicule and belittle the new technology. But they're sales people and not technologists or developers.
It's like watching the dinosaurs make fun of the asteroid. (What a big, dumb rock!) They would rather have yet another bad sales quarter in an endless string of bad sales quarters than attack their compensation. It's especially fun when it's the end of the quarter and you finally get the call from a sales rep. They're desperate to meet their quota so they'll make a deal on your pathetically small order. They idea that a customer could get on a website and just buy the product at a reasonable cost without having to have a sales meeting to upsell them on another batch services, is incomprehensible to them.
Had Sun bought Apple? It would have been some vaporware product announcements until they realized their sales people weren't interested, sold off any assets of value, and shoved the rest of it in a warehouse as IP. They would go back to trying to hold the line against pesky cheap PCs (which aren't real workstations) and x86 servers (which aren't real servers).