[LINK] no more sun.com

[grove at zeta.org.au]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2011, Jan Whitaker wrote:

> "Sun Microsystems, one of the original gangsters responsible for
> supplying all the electronics and infrastructure we now know as the
> internet, ceased to be Sun Microsystems in January of last year.
> Assimilated into the Oracle juggernaut, its operations no longer
> carry that familiar logo and soon they'll no longer even be
> referenced in the same spot on the internet. Yes, after 25 years of
> answering the call of sun.com, the company that no longer is will be
> letting go of its former domain name as well. The site has already
> been redirecting users to Oracle for quite a while, but come June
> 1st, it'll be like the Sun we knew had never even risen."
>
> http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/16/sun-com-the-twelfth-oldest-domain-on-the-internet-will-be-deco/


Very sad indeed. 
As someone who uses Sun products every day and in fact has built a 
kind of career out of Solaris (at the expense of OS like Linux), I 
am very sad to see such an icon go.  Oracle has subsumed all the Sun 
infrastructure and branding and apparently also converted all the 
internal business systems over to infernal business systems.

That which used to be pure is now taint and the simplicity and general 
ease of SunSolve (although it could be annoying) is now an over complexified 
Flash driven monstrosity called "MOS".

The old campus life culture of Sun is gone too - many Uni's have had a good 
run with Sun gear, sold at a discount break that made using even their high
end gear accessible and in the hands of idiots like me ;)

Now with the new corporate model of Oracle, they really want to squeeze 
whatever they can financially out of something I actually considered a 
kind of public service ;)

The troops at Sun that I know (and the ones still there) are some of the 
brightest and most talented people around.   They've always been fun 
to deal with as well - there is something about the UNIX world and 
especially Sun, that has always had an affable and sometimes humourful 
relationship with its customers - they really are terrific people.

I would say that most of the days of "old Sun Micro" are going to 
end now, with Oracle setting it sights lower and just going for the commodity 
cash grab.

At least SPARC is still there - holding out against the Intel/AMD bigendian 
boxes.   I have always been a huge fan of SPARC and the related architectures.
That puts me completely out of step with 99.99% of the rest of the 
current crop of UNIX admins.   Only an idiot would recommend a SPARC/Solaris 
system over a Lintel platform.  But it is a wise idiot who knows that 
Lintel just ain't good enough when it gets to the Enterprise level (flames 
to /dev/null).

I would like to say thank you to the old Sun Microsystems, one corporation
that was not actually a weasel company.   You had great people, great
products, crap marketing and brilliant R&D.   You will be sorely missed.

To those of you who have decision powers in your enterprise, 
if you are still using Sun products and are planning to move on, 
please reconsider.   The alternatives are weaker, the support 
patchy and the TCO much less, especially when in the hands of capable admins.


I am not an employee of Sun MicroSystems, Oracle or SNOrcle. 
Just an avid fan of elegant technology.....

....they were good times......


rachel

-- 
Rachel Polanskis                 Kingswood, Greater Western Sydney, Australia
grove at zeta.org.au                http://www.zeta.org.au/~grove/grove.html
    "The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum." - Finagle's Law