<<Do you believe SUNW will be the next Digital Equipment Corporation?>>
techtonicbull ... you mean as in disappear? ... if you think so, please tell us why ...
I never worked at Sun, but I worked at DEC for 5 years (1978-1983) as a technical recruiter ... and later as a consultant/contractor in 1984-85.
DEC failed for a lot of reasons ... (1) They really had almost no competition in mini-computers. Their two principal competitors, Data General and Hewlett-Packard, had less market share together than did DEC. Too much success ended up being a serious issue. This is not true for Sun. (2) DEC was purely engineering driven. Marketing was always weak as far as I know. I don't know whether or not Sun is market driven - perhaps you or others can comment. (3) DEC's refusal, until the last minute, to give up on their own proprietary VAX-VMS operating system instead of adopting UNIX was a typical DEC decision based on too much success and some arrogance. (4) Ken Olsen strongly believed that the PC (this was in 1981 or 1982) would never be something that would be useful in the market. An engineering driven belief that was just plain wrong. Where was the good marketing input? As a result, their first PC (called Robin) was a quick effort with virtually no applications software to run on it. Their next effort, (the Pro series) had practically no applications software either. This does not sound like Sun to me. In fact, Sun killed Apollo Computer, DEC and others in workstations with UNIX. (5) DEC could not see that their future competition was coming from both the low end and the high end as chips got more powerful and mainframes got smaller. Lastly, (6) their matrix form of management was very slow to make decisions and very inefficient in general.
DEC was a wonderful company to work for, and Ken Olsen was a great leader and innovator. He brought, I believe for the first time, a significant upgrade in benefits to employees in the high-technology industry worldwide. But it is tough to be as dominant as they were with little competition. They were not forced to look at things that, in retrospect, they should have. Mistakes came back to haunt them. When they went on a hiring spree in 1984-85, I am trying to remember, adding over 40,000 new employees, they really had a monster organization, that looking back probably should not have been added to at all.
Is Sun like DEC? I do not know, but I don't think so.
Ken Wilson |
