Sun sets on Silicon Valley's Sun Microsystems
Silicon Valley is anything but a sentimental place. Companies come and go. They start. They fail. We move on.
Sun MicroSystems is now completely acquired by Oracle Inc., All those products and sites are under Oracle.
Try to open SUN official site, you will be redirected to Oracle home.
But every now and then a giant falls. And so it is with Sun Microsystems, which now goes by Oracle. Larry Ellison's company closed its $7.4 billion deal last week and after 28 years Sun is no more.
"For those of us who were a part of Sun, it's a sad day," says Kim Polese, now CEO of SpikeSource and once Sun's PM (product manager) for Java. "It's a bittersweet feeling. We feel proud to have been a part of that legacy, but sad that Sun is not at the top of the industry and is in fact disappearing."
No doubt Sun shaped Silicon Valley in ways that only a few companies have. It had the full checklist of valley culture - an engineering-centric vibe; an appetite for risk and a propensity for making big bets on the future; a cocky CEO, who played hockey and golf with only winning in mind; and a mischievous streak that allowed for outrageous April Fool's pranks.
Of course, Sun leaves a tremendous technological legacy. Its marketing claim that it was "the dot in dot-com" wasn't hyperbole. The company was pushing the idea of network computers before most of their customers had even contemplated the possibility. It built the servers and storage to make it happen. It created Java, which allowed developers to write large programs for businesses that could run across different platforms.
Sun MicroSystems is now Oracle Sun
Friday, February 05, 2010,
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