Ask HN: Was Sun Microsystems the last respectable tech company?
I have fond memories of Sun, they made great hardware, gave us Java and open sourced a lot of stuff. Mainly I don't recall ever feeling the distrust that I have for the current crop. Was Sun the last decent tech company of our era? Sun veteran here. There was undoubtedly a "cool" factor to Sun in the 1980s and 1990s which I and a bunch of other people bought into. It had burned off by the mid 2000s though after the dot-com bust and wave after wave of layoffs and canceled projects. Any "cool" was left at that point was only from nostalgia and inertia. But I guess it depends on what you mean by "respectable" or "decent". It may be helpful to remember that a lot of people hated Sun in the 1980s and 1990s too. DEC (Digital) was a particular rival in those times. Spurred by the successes of NFS and the Sun/AT&T Unix deal, DEC created the OSF to counter Sun. Later on, there was something similar with IBM and Sun over Java. IBM eventually did license Java, but there was a lot of conflict. I think in both cases the issues were mostly about licensing and business terms. Maybe this was nothing more than corporate rivalry and competition, but it kind of felt more personal than that. At a Sun reunion a few years ago, Scott McNealy said of Sun, "We kicked butt, had fun, and we didn't cheat." The "kick butt and have fun" had been McNealy's slogan for a long time, but the "didn't cheat" was relatively new. I believe it to be true. I don't think Sun ever defrauded anybody. (It made mistakes, and plenty of them, but didn't defraud anybody.) In a world that has Enron and Theranos and FTX, maybe this is an outlier. But there are probably also many other companies that don't make that news that are making an honest buck and aren't cheating. This is what makes HN great, thanks for your insight! I don't know... I have fond memories of SUN (younguns: it stands for Stanford University Network, not our neighboring star), but they screwed up commercially a few too many times and tried too long to hang on to workstations when it was clear they were going away --ironic for a company whose motto was "the Network is the Computer" (definitely best motto of a computer company ever). And SunOS >> Solaris I feel like Google was respectable for a good amount of time after Sun vanished, though as of late they have lost any semblance of respectability. Schmidt was the former CTO of Sun and many early engineers at Google originated from Sun. I would argue that everything good in Google was Sun and as Schmidt left this started a process of fading away. if i had the ability to vastly influence what people read about me everyone would think i was pretty amazing too It wasn't like that in the early days. They were a scrappy garage outfit spawned from a couple of academic researchers, fighting against Yahoo and Altavista and the like. At its release, Google Search was a true technical marvel compared to its contemporaries. For another decade after that, they (through acquihire or in house development) revolutionized office suites, online mapping, aerial imagery, email, photo search, Android, web browsers... seemingly all at once. It wasn't until the last 8-10 years that they seeming stopped innovating and entered "hang on to our profits at any cost" mode and really increased the advertising spam everywhere. The change seemed to come a few years earlier than that, by my reckoning; the launch of Google Plus was clearly a fear-driven reaction against the growth of Facebook, and that felt like a real departure from their previous attitude of sunny, generous optimism. I mean, that ability of Google hasn't changed. If anything, Google has more influence than it did in those days. And yet, their corporate image has taken a nosedive. this year i watched a company buy a hypervisor company and jack the renewal rates 5 times knowing that it will take 4 years for their biggest accounts to ditch them. and that the twenty years of renewals they get in 4 years is worth destroying the hypervisor to get the money imagine a company that purchases space shuttles and lights them on fire in a field because it's more profitable than launching them. as much as it makes sense using math it's heartbreaking to watch as an engineer > imagine a company that purchases space shuttles and lights them on fire in a field You mean like SLS throwing all of the remaining Shuttle engines into the ocean, and then making more of them for $100 million each, and then throwing THOSE into the ocean too? I too have fond memories of Sun Microsystems. My customers would run into interesting bugs that "should not happen", sometimes causing a core dump. I would upload that core dump to Sun and usually within 15 to 30 minutes I was on the phone with a kernel developer that was actively debugging or more often fixing the bug. They would sometimes offer me a one-off kernel build but I would wait until it was officially released. I experienced something similar to this maybe two times interacting with Redhat but I had to skip their support chain to do it and kernel developers would be curious and fix some odd bug usually NetApp related but it was not like Sun where this was a regular part of the support process. In fairness we paid for the highest level of support Sun offered whereas we only had a handful of customers individually with Redhat support. Still, I had never seen anything like Sun Microsystems since. Not even close. Sun stuff was remarkably well built physically, too. At least the server gear i was scrap sourcing and extending the life of. It was possible to do things like swap parts on power supplies, because the designs were not full of tricks to prevent that. Those monster backplane slots were full of delicate little pins that were easy to bend, but the pins themselves were actually made tough and hard to break so a fine touch could have a hope of straightening them. They made all their docs available, and kept them up for a very long time. The PDFs of the service manuals were immensely valuable. I was so happy opening a Sun box and wondering what tools I'd need to do whatever job I was doing, and discovered a Sun-branded screwdriver mounted inside the case. It made it clear that someone had really cared about the user it when it was designed. I worked at Aim Tech (of Aim benchmark fame) on a performance management tool Sun contracted with us to build for its servers that had a physical view - photorealistic images of the rack and each board with component level highlighting of status/failures. Way over the top compared to any other system I ever worked on. Very probably. It was the only tech company I have ever worn the logo of by choice. I have a few Java coffee cups that have the older Java logo and say "brewed by Sun Microsystems" on them that I use constantly. Feels like they give me some old school cred. I still dream of showing up on Antiques Roadshow with them and being told they're worth thousands... I keep an IPX lunchbox on my desk to remind me. Valve still seems like a great company, with a strong customer focus (refunds, sales, mods, community, reviews, etc.), decent hardware (Deck, Index), good open source software (Proton), and good customer support. The fact that your one-time purchases are perpetually held hostage by Valve is a pretty rotten principle at the very core, and Valve is guilty here just like many other companies. Why should your continued ability to play games you've purchased offline depend on Valve deciding you're still in their good graces? Why can't you have your own independent & transferable copy of what you've purchased so they can't dictate what you do with it outside their servers? How do you respect a company that sells you something but still maintains the right to revoke your access to it? Oh and did you forget about lootboxes? and their effects on children? (Note I'm taking a somewhat exaggerated position here -- I don't think Valve is a terrible company as far as companies nowadays go. But the bar in this question seems intended to be absolute, not relative.) I guess none of that has ever bothered me? I grew up in the 90s with physical media, and many of those games are now unplayable too. But Steam enabled indie gaming like never before, surpassing even the shareware scene. The easy storefront plus good discoverability and community and good downloads management makes me choose Steam despite DRM. GOG has been selling DRM free for a decade or so now, but I still choose Steam because their software is so much better (Galaxy is atrocious and has gotten worse recently). And I don't really care about cosmetic lootboxes, I guess? I've bought some (too many) for Path of Exile. I'm glad they are a funding model that enables free to play. I find it less obnoxious than the paid DLC model, in-game advertising, etc. As for kids, well, shouldn't parents control their spending anyway? > I guess none of that has ever bothered me? I grew up in the 90s with physical media, and many of those games are now unplayable too. Unplayable because you don't have the machines to execute them (or because you didn't take care to copy your media that got damaged), not unplayable because the companies subsequently revoked your access to them. Those are... pretty darn different things. It's like saying "my groceries spoiled" is the same as "the supermarket came back and seized my groceries" just because they have the same end result. > I still choose Steam because their software is so much better You're of course welcome to, but your question wasn't about product quality. Great product != great company. > And I don't really care about cosmetic lootboxes, I guess? Lots of countries did. If your bar for respectable is "I don't care about it"... that's not really a question to pose to the rest of the world. > As for kids, well, shouldn't parents control their spending anyway? This is a much bigger conversation than we can have in this box, but suffice it to say lots of people don't buy this kind of excuse. I agree with you from one perspective, but on the other side steam made a drm that it's possible to bypass, while still complying, to allow selling games that wouldn't have been available on gog otherwise. What I think they are doing is pushing toward what would be good, but doing that very slowly. I wish gog worked well with the steam deck, and had all the cool steam stuff for controllers and linux support, but they aren't doing any of that. I don't think using DRM makes a company evil, unless the DRM is so intrusive it screws with the rest of the system (Sony rootkits, Denuvo, etc.) It's just a reality of digital marketplaces where piracy is rampant. Lootboxes and always-on servers actually kinda help with that, at the expense of truly being a subscription and not ownership. I know HN skews wanting to "own" games, but that's just not a big deal to most gamers. Physical media and DRM-free have always competed with Steam and GamePass and uPlay etc, but the latter are increasingly popular. Countries are free to have their values, of course, but regardless, I don't think the presence of lootboxes in a couple games overrides all the other good Valve has done for the PC gaming community. Other companies can (and do) implement loot boxes too. Fortnite's are much worse, being pay to win (in its original Save the World coop mode, not the more popular Battle Royale mode), but Epic's game store and exclusivity policies are much worse for the community. Activision, EA, Ubi, etc have similar lootboxes, often with similar DRM, but without any of the good of Steam and the customer focus of Valve. Those are industry wide problems that probably should be resolved with regulation. But that doesn't make Valve a good or bad company, IMO. Of course others can disagree. As for parents and kids, yeah, it's another discussion, but sounds like the same old thing about video games ruining kids. Whether it's Wolfenstein and violence or lootboxes or TikTok addiction or whatever, it still comes down to parental guidance. Its not an excuse, it's just a reality that kids grow up with way more technology and marketing than in the past, and that's a cultural issue way bigger than any one company (or government, for that matter). That's not on Valve. I don't have the bandwidth to continue most of this discussion, so I'll leave it to others, but just a couple quick notes because I feel these are moving goalposts: > I don't think using DRM makes a company evil I don't either, but this is neither pure DRM, nor was "evil" the bar to begin with. There's a lot of room in the middle for both. DRM technologies have existed that didn't prevent you from owning or transferring your own copy. > I know HN skews wanting to "own" games, but that's just not a big deal to most gamers. HN also "skews" toward caring about privacy, but billions of people use (say) Google and Microsoft etc. without minding what they do. If your bar is "it's not a big deal to most users" then wouldn't tons of companies easily pass it easily, especially the giants? They didn't become giants by being boycotted... For sure we don't have to keep arguing these things. They are trivialities in the grand scheme of things :) But I think that's kinda the overall discussion, isn't it? There are different facets to every company and people have different values. What bothers one person might not bother another. I remember Sun, in its heyday, as being disliked as well because its workstations were so expensive and Java was terrible in its browser applet days (in the same way Microsoft would come to be disliked for ActiveX). I tremendously respect Valve and am grateful that they've stayed privately owned and able to maintain their culture. At the same time, others may find fault in the way they do business. I don't expect all of us to agree on who the respectable companies are. Family view. Everybody forgets until you get children. The upgrade currently in beta allows the family to lock the library only per game and not per library, so we can finally have a real gaming library Valve lets their games rot whilst still extracting tons of money from them. Example: Team Fortress 2, the official servers for the game have been overrun by bots that aimbot, votekick, say slurs, spam illegal content, what are they doing about it? Nothing. https://save.tf Example 2: CSGO/CS2, also full of cheaters and illegal gambling sites Let’s hope Valve never goes public The day when Gaben retires. Valve, the gambling company? Are you talking about lootboxes? That's only for one or two of their games, isn't it? Meanwhile Steam single handedly remade the PC gaming industry. > That's only for one or two of their games, isn't it? What difference does that make when the magnitude for one game was on the order of a billion cases? This is like saying Microsoft is an evil company because Overwatch has cosmetics. It's just one of their products. Counterstrike doesn't define Valve. They do so much more than that, especially for those of us who don't even play CS. The lootboxes were something they added much later. It was originally just a Half-Life mod. I don't think enough is made of this aspect of Valve. Who knows if it's accurate, but a report claimed they did $1 billion in Counter Strike cases last year. https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/ And you have a skin that has sold for over $1 million now. https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-o... Based on the first article, it's all cosmetic items, which I think matters a lot to the ethics. Looks like rich companies tend to look respectable Valve is a good pick, at least as much as any company can. but the one mark against them is that by pushing Steam, they normalized DRM in the video game space and killed physical media on PCs. I think that "killing physical media on PCs" is a bit of a misattribution here. Physical media is all but dead on consoles as well, and people mostly buy their games online. PC gamers are fortunate enough that at the exact right time, a company operated with a bit of moral character essentially created the killer app for digital distribution, and with its dominant position forced tons and tons of positive changes to the PC ecosystem. Without Valve there would be no proton/Linux support, granular regional pricing, unobtrusive DRM, game library sharing, steam workshop, the ability to mod accessibility into games through forced controller mapping, booting games directly into friend's lobbies through the friends list, and probably more I can't think of offhand. I think customers chose that. GOG has been around forever, but Steam is so much better that DRM was worth it to millions of gamers. Yes it was. There was an era when MBAs avoided tech companies like plague. Techies ran tech companies and being an engineer was required to be a CEO of Tech companies . Sun software was for a long time closed source, their turn to open source was more like a hail mary rather than some deeply held belief. I'd say that 1990s, 2000s google was pretty cool, but it turned evil quite quickly. When Solaris 2 came out, they gave us the choice to buy their C compiler or to install the free-of-charge open-source gcc. There was no pressure to buy. If we were private users rather than corporate users, that was especially the case. And a lot of Java stuff was sold to us for a very nominal sum (probably just the cost of production). > There was no pressure to buy. With the caveat that you had to buy Solaris. Well, yes, but you had Solaris 2 in the first place or you didn't need either Sun's compiler or gcc at all. Sun took a while to change the model but went bigger on OSS than any other company by a mile. They published their code but not under an OSS license. Since Schmidt was the CTO of Sun Google inherited some of its culture. But that faded away. > Sun took a while to change the model but went bigger on OSS than any other company by a mile. They published their code but not under an OSS license. ? The big one I know about was OpenSolaris under CDDL; what non-OSS licenses did they use? E.g. source for the JDKs Java classes shipped with the JDK well before the open sourcing of the JDK. It had the click through download license. NeXT, Sun, Silicon Graphics, 3D/fx. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... As far as visual appearance goes, I was always a fan of the SGI machines. The original NeXT cube was sweet, too. Sun's stuff was more beige-boxy (with a few lilac accents), but the hardware was damned solid. Linux probably had more to do with them dying off than anything else. Once you could run a nix on commodity Intel boxes, the race was over. To give a few giant examples: Stripe for a good while was (at least at some point) very highly perceived, I think? And just 9 days ago I saw people praising Logitech. [1] No idea what the broader sentiment is currently (no news is good news, maybe?), but it seemed to me people loved it for a long time at least in the past? Mozilla for a long time seemed pretty respectable, regardless of how people feel about them now. There are lots of small tech companies out there that simply have respectable businesses but that you don't know or immediately think of because you just don't use them. The problem is MBAs and financialization Good tech companies are those that focus on their products or services, but almost inevitably they get taken over by 'business' people; private equity, MBAs, CFOs, etc, and then milked to death. Nvidia. Pretty much the only founder-led megacompany, still disrupting the world. Pushing forward at a time when the competition decided to pull the brake on dGPU development, pushing forward on gpgpu long before it was cool (many years of “haha Jensen said nvidia is a software company, what a moron). People are butthurt prices are creeping up in the post-Moores law price era, but that’s just kind of the economics of the product. Gpus are the most sensitive to silicon pricing, being the biggest piece of silicon consumers use on a daily basis and all. They’ve always been intimately tied to Moores law (which is in fact jensen’s original insight about the niche that led to the company in the first place). A 4070 at $500 is actually less than an inflation-adjusted GTX 670 after all, $600 is barely an increase. If that’s your reason for hating probably the most innovative silicon company on the planet, well… It’s also a situation like valve where they probably aren’t the most innovative they could possibly be under a more competitive market… but their competition is so bad they can’t help constantly shooting themselves in the head constantly. Like apple/metal is probably the only real serious alternative at this point. Maybe there's some drama/changes that I've missed since I'm not really focused on their area, but in my mind Stripe is still pretty respectable. Is it that Sun was particularly respectable, or that it disappeared before the current run of subscription-driven lock-in revenue strategies took off? I can't imagine any reason to think they wouldn't be doing the same thing as everyone else if they were still around as an independent company today What was crazy was everyone 'hated' them at the time, because Java was replacing CGI and unix administrators were greatly annoyed. But I do think so. The internet ruined the entire foundational business logic behind "a respectable company". Instead of building just the tools, these companies now have the means to pry into our data too, so that is what they do. There's a number of smaller companies that I think might fit the bill. I have high hopes for Framework, we'll see if they keep it going. I don't think they ever collected any user data from a customer off a server or workstation. Mostly by virtue of dying before that became a thing, though. What I most remember about Sun is them acquiring MySql, ruining it, and making PostgreSQL the leader in open source databases. if I haven't used msoffice in 20 years nor my relatives is thanks to them.