A web form, filled out in the middle of the night. The next morning the phone rings. That is the whole story of how a 2005 startup ended up buying Dell instead of Sun, and on Sunday Bryan Cantrill, who was at Sun when it happened, distilled fifteen more years of hindsight into one sentence: Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.
The startup was Joyent. It ran on OpenSolaris, it was growing fast, and it wanted to buy a lot of Sun hardware. Sun had just open-sourced Solaris on exactly the bet that this would happen: give away the software, sell the boxes it runs best on. The bet paid. Then the customer could not get anyone at Sun to pick up the phone, and when someone finally did, they pitched the wrong product. Dell sent Steve.
In less than 2 weeks we had some chances to "pitch" the company to get into a certain pricing tier, had all the servers in the datacenter, and had managed to get it all leased based purely on the company's financials (no personal guarantees). And honestly, 95% of all of the work was done by Steve. I felt like a Big Company. I felt like Steve worked for me.Joyent, 2006
Cantrill read that post while squatting in abandoned Sun office space with the Fishworks team, and his line about it is the one worth keeping: it represented so much strategic success and was ultimately a story of operational failure. That is the diagnosis, and it is a more useful one than the usual autopsy.
The usual autopsy says Sun was killed by commodity x86 and Linux, and by the dotcom crash that took its customers with it. True on both counts. But look at who the 2005 customer was. A cloud startup on commodity gear, running Sun's own open-source OS, was precisely the buyer the commoditization wave produced, and open-sourcing Solaris was precisely the right counter to it. Sun got the strategy right in the one place the strategy was hardest to get right. It lost the account in the one place that is supposed to be easy: a sales rep who calls back. Strategy is the part a company can rethink in a quarter. The mechanics are the part it has to want to do every day, and Sun had stopped wanting to.
Sun got the strategy right in the one place it was hardest to get right, and lost the account in the one place that is supposed to be easy.
The skeptic will say one blog post is an anecdote, and that Sun's real problem was gross margin on SPARC, not the phone. Fine. But an anecdote is what a strategy looks like from the outside when it meets a customer, and this one was not a fluke. Sun's answer to commoditization was to become a company whose software was everywhere and whose hardware was the natural next call. That model has one load-bearing step, the call, and the organization that built the model had lost interest in taking it. A margin problem you can see on a spreadsheet. A company bored of its own customers you can only see in a story like this one, which is why Cantrill still remembers where he was when he read it.
The relevance now is not nostalgic. The current crop of infrastructure companies is running the same play, open weights and open runtimes with the sale landing on the compute underneath, and the play is good. The question for each of them is whether anyone picks up the phone when the open-source bet works and a customer shows up wanting to buy. That is the boring part, and it is where the model is won.
Cantrill left Sun and joined Joyent, the startup Sun would not call back. Joyent hired Steve from Dell too. Years later the two of them started Oxide together. The company that lost the deal is on a t-shirt now. The rep who won it is a cofounder.