alt Hacker NewsAs much as this resonates with me it smacks a bit too much of an Engineering vs Sales fight. Engineering blaming Sales for not selling, and Sales... where is the voice of Sales? By 2005 Sun's margins on hardware sales had to be under vicious attack from Dell and all the old incumbents. Google and Amazon were ushering in the era of commodified compute and soon offering it on demand on the cloud. Proprietary hardware platforms were under the most vigorous multi-front assault since the inception of computing.
Meanwhile I have to imagine Sun, like IBM and everyone else at the time, was noticing what incredible margins you get from software services. No factories or fabs. No supply chain logistics. Sun's proprietary hardware business should have been dying (or at least radically shifting: a product/engineering problem, not a sales one) by all market indications of the time.
So if I was a sales person and got a call from a startup for a colo's worth of machines... I probably don't have much incentive to pick up. The startup will probably fail, as most do, so the opportunity to build a relationship and sell higher margin services is probably nil. Startups hate paying for that stuff anyway.
I have incredible respect for Bryan Cantrill. He obviously knows far more about this situation and business than I do, so he's almost definitely more correct than I am...
However I would ask readers to at least be curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?" Or was it a rational choice and much deeper problems with Sun's business model were the cause of their demise?
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I feel like Sun's main problem was that that era was pretty much the steepest part of the Intel S curve as far as chip performance goes, and it was outpacing the older chips on fab progress alone. I'm pretty sure had something like TSMC been around then at current strength, and Sun fabbed their excellent designs there, we'd have a mirror of what Apple is doing but in server space.
> I probably don't have much incentive to pick up.
This is what Dell got right - for their sales team, this was an easy process - the product line was simple and easy to customise. Their sales reps wouldn't spend much time creating the proposals and could spend the remaining time building relationships with a lot more customers, some of which wouldn't fail.
> curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?"
Unless you create incentives for bringing new customers, they'll leave the new names for last.
I don't know what Sun's strategy was in the 2000s, but doing all of the R&D to develop exotic new hardware and then focusing the sales force on software seems like they're getting the worst of both worlds.
Well, definitely read Jason's blog entry that I linked to[0], which gets into the structural problems. To be clear, there were some extraordinary sales folks at Sun (as was said to me when I first came to Sun: "Remember that our sales folks are so good that they sold Solaris 2.3 on Viking!"), and I always personally got along very well with them. I was happy to be put in front of customers, and they were happy to use me -- and some of my fondest memories were with sales folks in some of the geographies which were particularly strong (shout out to Sun Canada, Sun Australia, and to the Wall Street and Itasca offices in the US).
So this isn't about the people at all (they will express the same frustration!) but about leadership that wasn't interested in running a business. I do want to stop short of overly personalizing it, but the simple truth is: Scott visited customers where they lived -- and Jonathan more or less didn't.
[0] https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...