Sun did a lot of things wrong. Far more than you know. You could
actually make a movie, at a least a very interesting book about how the
Sun Ray came to be. It would put the Facebook movie to shame.
While Sun was busy sucking the life out Larry Ellisons 1995 NC concept
by trying to make Java an operating system, the smart folks at Sun Labs
saw the disconnect between the NC vision and the device Sun was trying
to build. They started secretly building their version of Larry's vision.
Did you know Sun Ray was prototyped and working before the first public
JavaStation shipped? And some of the people that did it are *still*
with the product?
Did you know the first patent with the words "Virtual Desktop
Architecture" in it is owned by Sun/Oracle as a result of the Sun Ray?
I guess that concept was just too far out there. So the marketing
message was "Dot.Com Your Workgroup". WTH does that mean?
Sun was still trying to make the JavaStation work even after the Sun Ray
release. Pretty confusing for everyone, including the press. Here's
Forbes.com leak a month before the release. Note the mention of a Java
OS. Note how they spelled out DHCP.
http://www.forbes.com/1999/08/03/mu11.html
My belief is Java is why the JavaStation failed. 3 years late. Full of
bad press. Yet Sun would never bad mouth it or take blame for the NC
vision dying. Why? Java. A technology that made other people
billions, but Sun could never monetize.
Do you like Open Office? Thank Sun Ray. StarDivision was bought for
exclusively for the Sun Ray. Although the popular story that it was
bought because McNealy refused to buy everyone a copy of MS Office.
McNealy did make a huge mistake though, in his war with Redmond he made
it free for every device. Kind of loses the carrot effect that had been
planned for it.
Too many egos and mixed messages resulted in Sun not knowing what they
had. There were internal wars. Schwartz hated it because he wanted to
talk about attracting developers and the press wanted to ask him about
Sun Rays.
Sun even tried to steal a page out of Apple's 1980 playbook by seeding
schools with Sun Rays. A 1980's kid had most likely never seen a
computer. Pac-Man wasn't even out until 1980. The Apple could have been
complete crap and it still would have succeeded. A 1999 kid had Windows
95, 98, ME, and XP beta. They had Nintendo 64, Sony Playstation, Sega
Dreamcast. To think that you'd gain mind share and adoption from these
kids by sitting them down in front of Solaris 7 and CDE is as likely as
the orginial Star Trek (special effects and all) warmly received 20
years after Star Wars was released.
And there's a lot more. Told you it was interesting. It's still the
best idea Sun ever had.
On 2/28/11 5:00 PM, Ivar Janmaat wrote:
Hello Craig,
I really agree with yours statement below.
Craig Bender schreef:
These companies think they can be the next Dell, the Cloud Dell so to
speak. However their model is the very thing that is actually holding
the thin client market back from really gaining "mind share". Dell
knows exactly what a cloud PC is and they can do it cheaper than these
companies.
However Sun also did not market the Sun Ray very well.
They basically fell into this trap because of the way they sold it.
If we compare the Sun Ray with a coach/touringcar again.
And a PC / Thin client with a car.
Then I would say that the Sun Ray sales people were selling the coaches
through car dealers.
Somehow they thought that the customers of car dealers would buy coaches.
My experience was that a lot of coaches came back because they were to
hard to drive for someone with only a car drivers license.
So car dealers did not like to sell the coaches anymore.
On the other hand you had the Sun Sales people who were selling the
ticket systems at Greyhound and other large touringcar operators.
But they were not payed to sell Sun Rays and they heard about what
happened at the car dealers so they stayed far away from the Sun Ray.
In my opinion they should have been the drivers of the Sun Ray sales.
If Sun would have focussed on the Touringcar operators, I am convinced
it would have been another ballgame.
But I think nothing is lost yet. The current touringcar operators are
the Saas providers. And there can still be a lot to gain.
Since I believe the Sun ray is the only solution which can handle the
requirements of a SAAS provider easily.
This would also mean that ICA, PCOIP and other protocols available at
SAAS providers should be on the SRSS roadmap. ;-)
Kind regards,
Ivar
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