I used to work with Sun for quite some time; I can say without failure every single Sun tech I came across was pretty damn cool, knew what they were doing and was hooked up in the Sun-universe enough so they could provide excellent pointers and ultimately that translated into happy customers. On top of that a lot of their enterprise-y software wasn't half bad to begin with, it was just always terrible getting good documentation and information as an "outsider" oh and there were a couple of years when you could just forget the sorry excuse they passed off as "support". But there was always the possibility of going "black-ops", just de-compiling and providing your own fix and although this is far from great, things just worked and everyone was happy. Sun's suits didn't really matter from our point of view anway, they did no harm, stood in nobody's way, shook hands and invited folks to dinner when appropriate. Fair enough, you cannot really ask for more, anymore and it would literally be paradise, so I was happy with that. Even-though I never got that project manager I was basically paying for...
Enter big red. Talking to brain-washed zombies cannot feel very different from talking to Oracle's sales drones and customer relation dummies. You were talking about "A", they would start trying to sell you pricey-addon for the database when you weren't even talking databases in the first place. Whoever was a useful tech contact inside Sun before now turned into a walled-off zombie as well and I guess I was lucky they didn't just slap a price tag on picking-up the phone or simply answering an email. And to top it off I had to suffer one of their pre-sales dummies loudly telling an oh-so-ridiculous story how, can you imagine, bigcorpA was running tomcat(!) in their production environment! And not the abomination from hell that Oracle gets away with charging huge amounts of money for!! Well can you imagine that!!!
Another case of too-big-to-fail and nobody ever got fired for buying Oracle, hm?
I'm a long time user and sufferer of Sun's products; going back twenty years at least. My experience is that except for their core product (SunOS/Solaris) their products have been awful - over-engineered, buggy, difficult to administer and install.
Exhibit 1 the trainwreck that was the Solaris firewall. I don't think anyone in the world understood or installed the first version. Then they introduced a 'lite' version which perhaps a few sorry souls used. Then I think some sane person in Sun said 'fuck it' and they then offered BSD's pf firewall. Which was what everyone used anyway as it had been available for quite a while from outside sun.com.
This experience mirrors mine with Oracle as well. The database is good and support excellent. The rest of it (I'm looking at you Oracl Fusion Middleware) has an extremely high WTF rate and the consulting and support staff often have no idea.
Bit Torrent makes all its money through Ask's tool bar. Ask props up a whole economy, it seems. But hey, at least Oracle figured out how to make money on Java! Sun never did that.
Which raises an interesting question - how do you make money on a platform like this?
I've been wondering because I think that my preferred managed environment (.NET) is doomed if Microsoft continues keeping it tied to Windows. On the Microsoft side, I suspect that Microsoft's market share in the server and enterprise space is going to continue dwindling for the foreseeable future, which means that their current plan for making profit is far from certain. But neither Sun nor Oracle seem to have figured out a way to distribute Java for free to the world at large and make a profit off of it, and it's hard to imagine that Microsoft is any more capable of pulling that rabbit out of its hat.
Perhaps the trick is that you don't try to make money on it, at least not directly. And there's a great project out there that's trying to do it that way. But, well. . . . ugh. I love Mono; it seems like it has everything going for it. From a technical standpoint it's been rapidly closing the gap with Microsoft's implementation, which I suspect means it's probably already ahead of the Java platform in many respects. The flagship language is certainly way ahead. And it has the singular distinction of being the only Free platform in this sector, which would make you think that folks would be extremely interested in seeing it win. Why that doesn't seem to be the case continues to mystify me. I know it's still got a few Big Business cooties on it, but it's got way, way, way less of them than Java does.
> Which raises an interesting question - how do you make money on a platform like this?
Professional services. Hardware sales. Turnkey solutions (you want to support industry X using Java? ...). Development tools (to the extent not provided by third-parties). Certification/compliance. Associated products (nice Java app you've got there, need a database to go with it?).
Here's a thing: making money off of software by itself is hard. One of the lost messages in the recent trash-talking of Microsoft is that the fall of the House of Redmond also means the fall of software as a standalone, unit-sold, high-value product. Nobody but nobody else operates this way, certainly none of the current tech leaders: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. Two sell ads, two sell things. None sells software.
> Which raises an interesting question - how do you make money on a platform like this?
Sell trainigns, certification, support (QA tested fixes for bugs that affected you before they are released to the public). SUN was doing all of that and was pretty successful. The hardware part of the bussiness failed them because of flood of cheap comodity servers.
I always thought the Microsoft makes money with server-side .NET by making people buy expensive Windows server licences. The whole .NET platform can be viewed as a "feature" of their server products, differentiating them from Unix-family alternatives.
I could be mistaken, but I seem to recall an add-on in the Java installer during Sun's ownership. I don't think it was the Ask toolbar, but something else. I was out of Sun before that, but that's when I knew the "near-paradise" was over and Sun was circling the drain. Where's fuckedcompany.com when you need it.
Enter big red. Talking to brain-washed zombies cannot feel very different from talking to Oracle's sales drones and customer relation dummies. You were talking about "A", they would start trying to sell you pricey-addon for the database when you weren't even talking databases in the first place. Whoever was a useful tech contact inside Sun before now turned into a walled-off zombie as well and I guess I was lucky they didn't just slap a price tag on picking-up the phone or simply answering an email. And to top it off I had to suffer one of their pre-sales dummies loudly telling an oh-so-ridiculous story how, can you imagine, bigcorpA was running tomcat(!) in their production environment! And not the abomination from hell that Oracle gets away with charging huge amounts of money for!! Well can you imagine that!!!
Another case of too-big-to-fail and nobody ever got fired for buying Oracle, hm?