He Sold It for $7.4 Billion. The Buyer Killed It in 90 Days

In 2010, Jonathan Schwartz sold Sun Microsystems to Oracle for $7.4 billion and resigned eight days later with a haiku on Twitter. Within roughly ninety days, the new owner had begun dismantling everything that made Sun worth loving: the open-source future was strangled, Project Kenai was marked for shutdown, and James Gosling, the father of Java, walked out in disgust. This is the story of how a company once worth more than two hundred billion dollars was reduced to a corpse to be picked apart for its single most valuable organ, Java. But the easy version, that Oracle simply bought a dying company, misses the real tragedy. Sun was not killed by weakness. It was killed by the exact thing that made it great. Sun invented the future, NFS, TCP/IP plumbing, Solaris, and Java itself, and then gave it all away, creating enormous value while capturing almost none of it. Linux, Google, and cheap x86 hardware captured what Sun created. This is a story about the brutal difference between creating value and capturing it, and why loving your engineering more than your margins can be fatal. What do you think was Sun's fatal mistake, giving Java away, or refusing to embrace cheap hardware? Let us know in the comments, and subscribe for more deep dives into the giants that saw the future clearly and still could not survive it. #sunmicrosystems #oracle #java #techhistory #siliconvalley #jonathanschwartz #larryellison #jamesgosling #businessdocumentary #riseandfall #opensource #solaris #sparc #corporatefailure #computing