Ask HN: Was Sun Microsystems the last respectable tech company?

Sun veteran here. There was undoubtedly a &quot;cool&quot; 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 &quot;cool&quot; was left at that point was only from nostalgia and inertia.<p>But I guess it depends on what you mean by &quot;respectable&quot; or &quot;decent&quot;. 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&#x2F;AT&amp;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.<p>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.<p>At a Sun reunion a few years ago, Scott McNealy said of Sun, &quot;We kicked butt, had fun, and we didn&#x27;t cheat.&quot; The &quot;kick butt and have fun&quot; had been McNealy&#x27;s slogan for a long time, but the &quot;didn&#x27;t cheat&quot; was relatively new. I believe it to be true. I don&#x27;t think Sun ever defrauded anybody. (It made mistakes, and plenty of them, but didn&#x27;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&#x27;t make that news that are making an honest buck and aren&#x27;t cheating.

I don&#x27;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 &quot;the Network is the Computer&quot; (definitely best motto of a computer company ever). And SunOS &gt;&gt; Solaris

I feel like Google <i>was</i> respectable for a good amount of time after Sun vanished, though as of late they have lost any semblance of respectability.

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<p>imagine a company that purchases space shuttles and lights them on fire in a field because it&#x27;s more profitable than launching them. as much as it makes sense using math it&#x27;s heartbreaking to watch as an engineer

I too have fond memories of Sun Microsystems. My customers would run into interesting bugs that &quot;should not happen&quot;, 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.<p>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 <i>usually NetApp related</i> 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 <i>physically</i>, 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.<p>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.<p>They made all their docs available, and kept them up for a very long time. The PDFs of the service manuals were immensely valuable.

Very probably. It was the only tech company I have ever worn the logo of by choice.

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.

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.<p>I&#x27;d say that 1990s, 2000s google was pretty cool, but it turned evil quite quickly.

NeXT, Sun, Silicon Graphics, 3D&#x2F;fx. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...

To give a few giant examples:<p>Stripe for a good while was (at least at some point) very highly perceived, I think?<p>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?<p>Mozilla for a long time seemed pretty respectable, regardless of how people feel about them now.<p>There are lots of small tech companies out there that simply have respectable businesses but that you don&#x27;t know or immediately think of because you just don&#x27;t use them.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40539689">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40539689</a>

The problem is MBAs and financialization<p>Good tech companies are those that focus on their products or services, but almost inevitably they get taken over by &#x27;business&#x27; 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 <i>software</i> company, what a moron).<p>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).<p>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…<p>It’s also a situation like valve where they probably aren’t the <i>most</i> 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&#x2F;metal is probably the only real serious alternative at this point.

Maybe there&#x27;s some drama&#x2F;changes that I&#x27;ve missed since I&#x27;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&#x27;t imagine any reason to think they wouldn&#x27;t be doing the same thing as everyone else if they were still around as an independent company today

What was crazy was everyone &#x27;hated&#x27; 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 &quot;a respectable company&quot;.<p>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&#x27;s a number of smaller companies that I think might fit the bill. I have high hopes for Framework, we&#x27;ll see if they keep it going.

I don&#x27;t think they ever collected any user data from a customer off a server or workstation.

What I most remember about Sun is them acquiring MySql, ruining it, and making PostgreSQL the leader in open source databases.

if I haven&#x27;t used msoffice in 20 years nor my relatives is thanks to them.