Sun Microsystems
Dead1982–2010
| Industry | Technology |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, CA |
| Founded | 1982 |
| Died | 2010 |
| Peak employees | 39,000 |
| Peak revenue | $18.3B (2001) |
| Cause of death | Acquisition |
Sun Microsystems built the infrastructure of the early internet. Its SPARC workstations and Solaris operating system powered the dot-com boom. Java, arguably the most consequential programming language of the 1990s and 2000s, was a Sun creation. So were NFS, ZFS, and VirtualBox. Sun's motto, 'The Network Is the Computer,' predicted cloud computing decades before Amazon Web Services existed.
Sun made brilliant technology and terrible business decisions. When the dot-com bubble burst, Sun's revenue dropped from $18.3 billion to $11 billion in two years. The company never recovered. CEO Scott McNealy held on too long, and successor Jonathan Schwartz couldn't find a viable business model for a hardware company whose best products were free software.
IBM offered $7 billion in 2009. Sun's board pushed for more. Oracle bought it for $7.4 billion in 2010. Larry Ellison wanted MySQL, Java, and the hardware patents. He got them. Everything else — the culture, the open-source ethos, the people — was disposable.
Timeline
Founded by Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy at Stanford
Introduces SPARC architecture
Releases Java programming language
Peak revenue of $18.3 billion during dot-com boom
Dot-com bust; revenue drops to $12.5 billion
Open-sources Solaris operating system
IBM offers $7 billion; Sun pushes for more
Acquired by Oracle for $7.4 billion; brand retired