Oxide’s annual in-person gathering, OxCon, brings the remote company’s whole team to Emeryville this week. In preparation, the company made t-shirts paying homage to past computer firms, including Sun. But one design proved too hot to keep under wraps.
The shirt, drawn by the firm’s designer Ben Leonard, references Sun’s history. It is meant as a nod to the company’s legacy, but the response was immediate and personal. The company’s founder, who worked at Sun, is using the occasion to share what he thinks actually went wrong there.
Sun’s Legacy and Its Limits
Sun’s reputation is familiar to anyone who worked in tech in the 1990s and 2000s. The company became known for Solaris, a Unix derivative that ran on its own hardware. Its founders, including Scott McNealy, advocated for open source early, and McNealy’s reflection — that over 28 years he “never had to hide the newspaper in shame from my children” — remains a touchstone for corporate culture.
But nostalgia can be stifling. The founder writes that “folks that post-date Sun may reasonably demand to hear what Sun did wrong.” Sun, he says, did plenty wrong. He was never ashamed to work there, but he was not infrequently embarrassed by the stuff the company screwed up.
The Dell vs. Sun Comparison
The founder’s central case centers on a single 2005 incident. A startup that was running its infrastructure on OpenSolaris was looking to buy Sun gear. It should have been a win for Sun: the startup was growing rapidly, pioneering what would later be called cloud computing. It was using Sun’s software and wanted to buy a ton of Sun hardware. The model worked.
Except it did not. The customer could not get Sun to pick up the phone. When Sun did pick up, the company tried to sell the wrong product. The contrast with Dell was stark.
The startup filled out a web form in the middle of the night. The next morning, the phone rang. It was Steve the local Dell account executive. The startup felt like Steve worked for them. In less than two weeks, they had all the servers in the datacenter, leased purely on the company’s financials with no personal guarantees.
The Customer’s Account
The startup did Sun the service of writing it all up in a blog post, titled “The Sun Doesn’t Shine on Me.” The founder remembers reading it vividly, while he and his colleagues were just starting Fishworks and squatting in a corner of abandoned Sun office space in San Francisco. His heart sank. He felt that a company that had become bored with the mechanics of running a business could not succeed, no matter how successful its strategy.
Sun continued for a few more years. The founder says the company tried like hell to right the ship, but it was not enough. Sun did not make it.
The Aftermath
After leaving Sun, the founder joined that startup. Years later, he and Steve started Oxide together. The founder notes that the startup had the wisdom to hire Steve too.
The homage to Sun, the founder writes, is something deeper than nostalgia. “We admire these companies for the important things that they got right, but we study them to learn what they got wrong.”
What Sun Got Wrong, Ranked
- Reluctance to engage customers. Sun failed to pick up the phone when a growing startup tried to buy its gear.
- Selling the wrong product. When Sun did engage, it tried to sell the wrong thing.
- Operational boredom. The company became tired of the mechanics of running a business.
- Failure to adapt quickly. The founder says the company tried to right the ship, but it was not enough.
Why the T-Shirt Matters
The t-shirt was too hot to keep secret. That is the joke. But the story behind it is a genuine lesson for a company that wants to honor its predecessors while avoiding their mistakes.
The founder’s point is simple: Sun got the strategy right but the execution wrong. A company can build great technology, but if it cannot sell it, ship it, or answer the phone, it will fail. The Dell story shows what Sun lost — a sense of urgency, a willingness to engage, a feeling that the customer’s success is its own.
The founder’s own path took him from Sun, through a startup that blogged about Sun’s failures, to Oxide. He carries that lesson with him. The homage to Sun is not just a nod to history. It is a warning, and a warning is the sincerest form of tribute.
The t-shirt is a joke. The story is a lesson. The founder is doing both at once.
| Event | Date | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Oxide’s OxCon meetup | This week | Emeryville |
| Sun’s OpenSolaris startup incident | 2005 | Not stated |
| The Sun Doesn’t Shine on Me published | Around 2006 | Not stated |
| The founder joins the startup | After Sun’s failure | Not stated |
| Oxide founded | Years later | Not stated |
The founder’s assessment stands. Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business. That is the lesson he wants to pass on.
Source material: “What Sun got wrong,” bcantrill.dtrace.org.
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