[Hawkeye_a]

In 1998-ish when I started my undergrad program in computer science, everything was on Sun systems running Solaris. It also happened to be around the same time that Apple had hit bottom and had begun the process to recover.

Sun's & Apple's company model seem to be 'vertical'.... Both were using custom processors, designed their own hardware which came bundled with their own operating systems, with internally developed apps.

I realize that Sun's target market was education & coorporation/server and apple's was consumer.

Today Apple is the most valuable company in silicon valley. And sun has merged with oracle(which IMO doesn't make too much sence, considering the products, but who maybe Ellison will have better luck).

So I guess two 'vertically' oriented companies, different markets. Why did sun not take off?

Cheers

[Big Mac]

1. Jobs

2. Jobs

3. Jobs

4. Steve Jobs

5. SJ

Beyond that, I remember during the 1997ish period the rumors of Sun buying Apple. Fun times.

Apple succeeded because Steve brought a creative soul and marketing genius back to the company. He brought back visionary leadership. Apple succeeded because it reoriented itself to play to its strengths and to expand those strengths. Apple succeeded because of the iMac and the iBook and OS X, products that brought the Mac back to life. Apple succeeded because it found a way to make digital lifestyle gadgets appealing to the market as well as appealing to Apple's bottom line.

[Paco500]

There were lots or reasons Sun ran into trouble. After the .com crash, the entire world evaluated how they did things and looked for less expensive alternatives. For many companies, Linux on white box servers became "good enough." Microsoft also took a big chunk of the back office server market.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

1. Jobs

2. Jobs

3. Jobs

4. Steve Jobs

5. SJ

Beyond that, I remember during the 1997ish period the rumors of Sun buying Apple. Fun times.

Apple succeeded because Steve brought a creative soul and marketing genius back to the company.

And oddly, up to then, it was NeXT that had those five reasons up there, AND a mostly education market, AND own hardware, AND the failure of their own hardware line, leading to them getting bought up and folded into a larger company - Apple.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

And oddly, up to then, it was NeXT that had those five reasons up there, AND a mostly education market, AND own hardware, AND the failure of their own hardware line, leading to them getting bought up and folded into a larger company - Apple.

Very true. Jobs was unable to succeed in computing until he came back to Apple. (By the way, my top five reasons being SJ encompass everything positive he brought to Apple with him - especially all the talent from NeXT. For slight comedic effect I neglected to make that clear in my previous post.)

[mattyb]

LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP-Perl-Python) and cheap Intel boxen.

I don't understand what Larry wants with Sun.

[besson3c]

Sun's target audience was smaller, at the time its competition was less fierce. Apple's target audience was very large, although it had fierce competition. Apple figured out how to compete against Microsoft, although Apple's business is largely where it is today because of new products and opportunities which weren't really conceivable in the late 90s.