Sun has outstanding software engineering force. But that software talent was always dominated by and made to serve the purposes of its hardware rulers.23 Later Sun was trying to switch only to software but again that was a delayed action, as the place in this niche had already been taken by open-source operating system Linux. Sun could not prove a customer why he had to overpay for its high-end products, if by that time other analogues had been already developed on Intel Pentium processors or on Linux which were much cheaper and more available with open source code. Scott McNealy in his talk Feb. 24th at the Churchill Club in Santa Clara, Calif admitted: "The mistake we made was putting it on our own hardware. If we hadn't metal-wrapped it, it would have been more widely adopted. If we had put Solaris early on an Intel box, Linux never would have never happened."
Sun Microsystems had strong management. Its leaders were brilliant at setting goals and tuning the team to one common direction, but they were way too stubborn. The whole Sun Microsystems’ development was highly similar to fulfilling someone’s ambitions, desires and goals. Was that McNealy’s fault or all the executives’ mistake, that is hard to say,as the leadership of Sun had been building within years. That is outstanding when the company has the definite direction and is strongly moving towards it. However, the flexibility is much more significant, especially in the market of fast developing and changing technologies. Sun’s executives realised the need of some radical adjustments in management and business model and flexibility but that had already been behind time. Their desperate will to outrun everything and everyone by keeping concentrating on their position and direction created Sun’s new and main competitors which had managed to conquer the market before Sun Microsystems even stepped into that.
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