3 reasons why Sun Microsystems `failed'

Software major Oracle Corp recently completed its takeover of hardware company Sun Microsystems Inc for $7.4 billion. The deal, which was announced nine months ago, would transform the IT industry, Oracle claimed in a statement.

But what was it that led Sun Microsystem to put `On Sale' board. For, Sun was always this hot technology company that was even dubbed the poster boy of the Internet economy. Where then did Sun go wrong? Many have tried to find answers to this question. But there are no easy answers.

Dan Baigent, who was senior director of corporate development with Sun Microsystems when the company got acquired, wrote a candid inside view on the mistakes that he thinks Sun Micro made and brought it to its knees from the heydays of a peak valuation of $200 billion.

In a series of blog posts, Baigent sought to identify Sun's top 10 failures that finally brought Sun to the point that it had to be bailed out by Oracle in a $7.4 billion acquisition last month.

Interestingly, he managed to post only his three reasons (10, 9 and 8)before they were pulled down. We have recaptured the three reasons responsible for Sun's failure as enumerated by Baigent.

Reason No. 1: Failed to understand the x86 market

"We approached the market in the only way we knew how - as an extension of our high-end, low-volume, high-value approach to network computing. And not just in terms of product features and capabilities, but in terms of sales, partnerships, channel programs and supply chain management."

Reason No. 2: Messing with the Java brand

"(N)umerous attempts by well-meaning marketing folks at Sun to try exploit the value of the Java brand itself and how that ultimately reduced the very value they tried to exploit. To some degree, this is as much about the lack of value in the Sun brand (at least outside our loyal customer base) as it is about Java".

Reason No. 3: Fumbling Jini

"The real problem was that the engineers had built this technology using the latest Java platform...and had incorporated specific changes into J2SE 1.2 to support the Jini requirements. When launched, Jini could not run in anything smaller than a device with 64MB of memory and a Pentium-class processor.... Meanwhile, Marketing and PR were off describing uses of the technology that were all about small devices (cameras, printers, cell phones, etc.) that were completely unable to run RMI, nonetheless the Jini on which it was built.”