The other day it was announced that Bill Joy was leaving Sun Microsystems he co-founded two decades ago. Joyless Sun is now the last of its kind -- proprietry Unix vendors or sales channels for SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC CPUs. All those fragmented Unixes (Solaris, Irix, Ultrix, Digital Unix, AIX to name only a few) had been little more than wrapping paper for the CPUs. Neither Sun, SGI, Digital nor anybody foresaw relentless march of Intel's positive feedback cycle between increasing market share and performance. Fragmentation of hardware and software worsened as overall Unix market deteriorated against Wintel monopoly. These vendors formed and disbanded numerous consortiums against each other, tried their hands on premium-priced PC, abandoned their Unix and became irrelavent.

Unlike the others IBM did not have fixation on OS as product differentiator or customer lock-in tool and provided Websphere running everywhere from PC to Unix to its venerable mainframe as higher level, portable application platform. Contrast IBM to Sun: Sun provided binary compatibility across many versions of Solaris on SPARC and made Solaris scale to hundreds of SPARC CPUs on its StarFire mainframe. Yet this engineering prowess made Sun a niche player for its customers and developers who did not want to be wedded to single OS no matter how great. As Sun continued to provide lackluster middleware products and slow SPARCs the customers and developers gradually moved to cheaper alternatives, leaving Sun the last Unix vendor standing and slowly sinking.

What Joy plans to do next is of great interest. Joy was a key figure in developing BSD Unix and SPARC that made up Sun's software and hardware as well Java (then Jini, followed by Jxta). He is one of the few people who made many sea changes in the industry.

Update on 2003-09-14 San Francisco Chonicle has a long interview with Scott McNealy of Sun, the last remaining co-founder and the CEO.