This history reads like a book-length marketing promotion for Sun Microsystems. In a section at the back of the book entitled “Authors’ Coda,” the authors admit a strong bias in favor of Sun Microsystems and that, in fact, they were employees of Sun while writing this book. They do say that the book was written on their own time and without any support or authorization from Sun. The authors take enormous leaps of faith in giving Sun almost total credit for the very existence of the “open systems” marketplace. At the same time they downplay all of the converging market forces external to Sun that provided Sun with the opportunities to which it fell heir. According to this book, Sun’s successes are due totally to its foresight, marketing genius, and technical brilliance. Good luck combined with good timing in the market should have been given a larger share of the credit.
The book will only be really interesting reading to Sun’s employees, investors, and most direct competitors. The authors repeatedly attempt to draw the conclusions of history from Sun’s brief, although spectacular, existence. The possibility that Sun could burn out just as quickly as it has flared up, while mentioned in an occasional aside, is not considered real.
An occasional factual misstep adds to the book’s lack of credibility. One example is a statement in chapter 1 that UNIX was in the public domain (in the time period covered by the book, UNIX was the property of AT&T). Another is a statement in chapter 3 that in 1986 DEC’s top-of-the-line minicomputer was the VAX 11/780 (by 1986, the VAX 11/780 had long since been replaced in DEC’s product line). By themselves, these errors would not be fatal. Together with the overall “Sun walks on water” tone of the book, the fact that most of the source material came from Sun, the lack of non-Sun points of view, and the presentation of shallow analyses of recent events as historical research, they make this book a disappointment.
The book fails to bring to life most of the key personalities in the success of Sun. While the founders and some of the top executives are profiled, most of the descriptions read like they came from brief third-party interviews and from magazine articles prepared by Sun’s marketing department. Tracy Kidder set a much higher standard for the presentation of personalities within a computer manufacturer in The soul of a new machine [1].
Although the introduction tells us that “The brief history of Sun Microsystems is an object lesson in how to build a major corporation…,” the lesson is never clear. Instead, the lesson, if in fact it is there, is left to the readers to extract on their own.
Topics covered, with varying degrees of success, include
the founding of Sun Microsystems,
the dealmaking that made Sun prosper,
the competitive environment in which Sun’s spectacular growth took place,
the growth of the UNIX-based system market,
the management and corporate cultural environment within Sun, and
recent problems befalling Sun.
For most readers, my advice would be to borrow this book from your library rather than to buy it. You will not need to study it too hard; a quick scan will net you most of the information the book has to offer.
