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James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

262 points by 10ren 16y ago

jacquesm 16y ago
From the middle of the article: "Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was that although they said they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs.” That's interesting, given that Gosling now decides to quit 'of his own accord', which is probably a lot cheaper than to lay someone off. Technically Oracle may not lay people off that readily, but I don't see how you could interpret Goslings treatment in any way but to force him out of the company. He had his compensation reduced, they clipped his wings and on top of all that used him to act at being a trained parrot.
- jacksonh 16y ago
  Gosling's layoff concerns were probably more about his friends and the people that worked for him.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Yes, but if they treat him like this I can't see people lower on the totem pole being treated much better, I'd rather expect the opposite.
    - mseebach 16y ago
      I think the implied trade-off is between "IBM axes former SUN-division Foo, 5000 fired" and "Stuck in an unpleasant, but decently paid, job with benefits and no particular obligation not to just pack up and leave when a better opportunity comes along."
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        Oracle has already fired close to 7,000 people of the original 27,000 that were part of the merger, in June they announced a further 1,000 people to be thrown out but at the same time said they would hire 2,000 new ones mostly for the sales division. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6536G820100604 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6536G820100604 I don't see how IBM could have done much worse, and I think that Java would have fared a lot better under IBM, which in the longer term would have probably meant more rather than less job security for the people working near Gosling. If he was talking about the company as a whole IBM would have had to fire more than 8,000 people to date do be doing as bad for the employees as Oracle did, now of course we'll never know so we can't really make any statements about that but I find it hard to conceive of it being so bad. IBM is very image conscious and I think they would have had a hard time murdering the core team around java at this clip, let alone destroying the technical core of Sun and replacing it with 'sales'.
        gamble 16y ago
        IBM has a policy of shipping as many jobs overseas as can be managed. They've moved tens of thousands in the last decade. What I've heard from friends suggests that it's not a pleasant environment for rank-and-file employees. AFAIK, Oracle doesn't have the same zest for shipping jobs overseas.
        Tamerlin 16y ago
        IBM's done worse before. In the late 90's my father was part of a first round of IBM layoffs -- in which they cut 6000 jobs... in Dutchess County, New York. That was the <i>first round</i> of layoffs. Another few thousand got cut a year so later. And I don't know how many they cut outside of Dutchess County...
        zacharycohn 16y ago
        Were they closing down the facility in Dutchess County? How big was it?
        16y ago
    - Gobiner 16y ago
      It's pretty easy to imagine that when Gosling was employed by Sun, he enjoyed significant power to shape his own job. Under Oracle, he clearly did not have the power to make his own job into what he wanted. It's not much of a stretch to believe that lower-tier technical staff didn't have that power to begin with, and hence did not feel the same sting of new management.
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        Yes, that's probably very true, in part this is Gosling being a similar sized fish in a much larger pond. But if I compare that to google where there are lots of 'names' from just about every era of computing working and being reasonably happy I can't help but notice the contrast. That changes the atmosphere of the place and that definitely does filter down to lower levels.
- whatusername 16y ago
  IBM and SUN had tons of competing products. They compete in: OS's - Solaris vs AIX; Hardware - Sun's Low end x86 vs systemX, SPARC vs Power, Disk Storage, Tape Storage; And probably a bunch more I can't think of. Oracle and SUN weren't really competitors in many spaces. So IBM would have been better for Gosling -- but there was more hope for the rest of the employees at Oracle.
davidw 16y ago
Some quotes: > Oracle did not have a notion of a senior engineer or at least one equivalent to Gosling’s grade at Sun, where he was a fellow. “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said. Says something about how they value technical people. > The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn’t save any money because the money had been spent – so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up because it wasn’t the ‘Oracle Way.’ On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million That's just Larry's favorite toy, I'd imagine the IRS to be interested in that as a deferred payment rather than Oracles shareholders, whatever floats Larry's boat (pun intended) is fine with them, as long as he delivers.
  - jonknee 16y ago
    IIRC Oracle doesn't pay anything, they're name is just on the boat because Ellison wants it to be. He's the one paying for it. But I'm sure the boat is actually owned by a corporation that gets its own write offs.
    - gaius 16y ago
      It's owned by BMW Oracle Racing, which is a separate company whose mission is essentially the same as an F1 team's - get their sponsor's names in everyone's minds by winning stuff on TV.
- yellowbkpk 16y ago
  One of the reasons I left GE was because there was no notion of a senior engineer in the software field (there are senior science positions in the research divisions). To go beyond "Software Engineer" you had to step into a managerial role and away from doing any software engineering. This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.
paulbaumgart 16y ago
A lot of big software companies seem to put significant effort into maintaining a good relationship with the developer/technical community, presumably in large part to keep the recruitment pipeline (especially of top people) flowing along. Oracle, by contrast, doesn't seem to give a shit and gets away with it[1]. Why? [1] http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1285185600000&chddm=494615&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:ORCL&ntsp=0 http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
- _delirium 16y ago
  I don't know much about this sector, but how does Oracle compare to its direct competitors? E.g. is SAP friendlier with the developer/technical community?
  - mhd 16y ago
    IBM with its DB2 product is a direct competitor, and seems to do a bit better, blue suits & company hymns notwithstanding. SAP is a special case, as it has a more limited target audience. The financial environment has a heavy, erm, taint on the typical SAP developer. Most of them are in it for the money, so I don't think a lot of them care all that much. College students in Germany often joke about selling your soul to become a SAP consultant… Whereas most Oracle developers or DBAs I've met are still more engineers than business types. Some companies just don't need a flourishing developer community. I think Oracle – especially after buying Sun – isn't one where this would seem advisable, but apparently they think different. Wonder how that will work out…
  - Tamerlin 16y ago
    Other than the aforementioned DB2, the only other competitor out there for Oracle is SQL Server. That has some big customers -- a large part of Disney's online infrastructure relies on SQL Server, for example.
    - dagw 16y ago
      Oracle the database isn't really Oracle's main product. They're real product is a bunch of industry specific applications and middleware (and related consulting services) that happens to need a Oracle database to run. So as such they're not really directly competing with SQL server (or postgres or whatever)
hopeless 16y ago
Oracle sounds as bad a company internally as externally. I'm hugely grateful that I've found other languages, frameworks and databases to base my career on and minimise Oracle's involvement in my life. Although I never worked for them, I loved the hardware and software output from Sun. It was good to have them in the tech ecosystem. I can't say the same about Oracle.
absconditus 16y ago
Darryl K. Taft is a horrible writer.
- skullsplitter 16y ago
  For real, "That bent Gosling’s resolve like a wishbone in the hands of two eager siblings in mid-pull after Thanksgiving dinner, but even that didn’t break it."
  - flatline 16y ago
    And later - I'm not sure what I was actually reading about for half the article: "But unlike Oracle, Davis and the Raiders have not had a winning season for awhile – not since my Baltimore Ravens flattened their hopes and the shoulder of quarterback Rich Gannon after a vicious pancake tackle by Tony Siragusa on the way to a Ravens’ Super Bowl winning season in 2001."
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - aaronbrethorst 16y ago
    Yeah, I bet Franklin W. Dixon could write better copy ;-) (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1705714 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1705714)
10ren 16y ago
Oracle has brilliant opportunities at the moment: they own a great processor (Sparc) that they could closely integrate with their database, application software and even Java... and (finally!) give IBM a run for their money. They have the cool and fast technology of both Sun's JVM and BEA's JVM (JRockit). They have acquired other brilliant technologies, and have in practice endless resources to acquire more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/index.html http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/index.html But... although it's simple to appreciate the advantages of combining technologies, it's very very hard to actually do. For example, the IBM 360 project, of a series of machines of increasing power (and price), that were all compatible, so customers could upgrade, is a simple idea. But implementing this was a bet-the-company project, it was celebrated as an incredible, miraculous achievement, and the lessons learnt from it remain popular to this day (The Mythical Man Month, by the leader of the 360 project, Fred Brooks.) To pull off these technical feats, you need the public superstar developers, but also the hidden superstar developers (the x100 coders; the people who, after working closely with them for a while, you observe, oh that guy's a genius); and then the x10 coders, who want to hang out with the geniuses and learn from them. It's places like HP used to be, where Woz wanted to work, at almost all costs (Woz himself being a x100 guy.) If you only have x5 or x7 coders; and if you don't support them (with infrastructure, secretarial etc - not just compensation, adequate decision-making power, and some kind of recognition.), then, well, you can't do these technical feats. You may seek but not find; ask but it shall not be given; knock but it shall not be opened. Though this is not a disruptive issue, the same factors occur of the difficulty for an established successful company to change its culture and business architecture. And Oracle doesn't want to change anyway.
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  " they own a great processor (Sparc)" I'm not so sure about that. For years x86 has been chewing up the market for Sparc processors, and one of the reasons that Sun had such poor finances is that it was selling x86-based servers more than Sparc based servers (they cost considerably less, and perform better). Fujutsu's Sparc implementation significantly outperforms Sun's. Contemporary Xeons outperform both these days. Besides, Sun has had a long history of massive screwups -- and they put "don't tell anyone we screwed up" clauses in their support contracts. One company just gave up when they got their UltraSPARC3 rig, found that not only was it not nearly performant enough to meet expectations, but also in order for it to function reliably, they had to disable the 2nd level cache on every CPU, or else a cache glitch would bring down the entire server (32 procs). It's not a great processor. It hasn't been for a long time. Sun has been the "flock of chickens" vs the POWER "bull" as a result.
ataranto 16y ago
"But unlike Oracle, Davis and the Raiders have not had a winning season for awhile – not since my Baltimore Ravens flattened their hopes and the shoulder of quarterback Rich Gannon after a vicious pancake tackle by Tony Siragusa on the way to a Ravens’ Super Bowl winning season in 2001." The Raiders were 11-5 the next year (2002) and went to the Super Bowl.
- shoover 16y ago
  Good point, but after THAT... horrors.
- philwelch 16y ago
  By "in 2001" he actually means the 2001 Super Bowl, so the 2000 season. The 2001 season was a Super Bowl winning season for the Patriots.
Astro9k 16y ago
It's interesting that a pay cut and a down-grade in title isn't what did it but that their marginalization of his input and control is what pushed him over the edge.
cageface 16y ago
So where does a guy like Gosling go now? Google seems to be serving the role that Bell Labs once did in giving all the top technical dogs a big playground but other than that it's hard to guess where he might fit in.
va_coder 16y ago
I sympathize with all the great Sun engineers that got a bad deal, but didn't Sun do poorly from an investor perspective? And isn't that important? As much as I really hate Oracle (I'm a programmer and don't like their products), they do really well for investors. They make fat profits each quarter. I don't really understand why - why people buy their overpriced, complex products - but they do.
- wh-uws 16y ago
  I can answer that one... their pointy haired bosses read the ads in the airports and business magazines that say "98% of Fortune 500 companies" use Oracle
- tsotha 16y ago
  The sales organization gets priority in Oracle. They're never going to start a project by asking "what would be cool?", but rather "what do our customers want?". Not the path to the most technically satisfying jobs, but companies like that stand a better chance of making money. I've worked at a few (smaller) software companies, and from what I can tell the ones that go out of business do so because they make really cool products that either 1) don't get connected to the right customers or 2) are missing some critical feature customers need because developers didn't understand the business space. Both problems are the result of a poor or unsupported sales organization. As a technical guy I get irritated by the sales people as much as anyone else, especially when they try to promise away my nights or weekends. But a software company won't survive without them. Based on my own experience I'd say the most successful companies could better be described as sales organizations that do software instead of software companies that do sales.
  - va_coder 16y ago
    I agree. I also think managers with discipline and ok intelligence are better than managers that are really intelligent with little discipline. The disciplined managers focus on what needs to get done and do it. (The don't spend part of their day reading HN ;)
- dagw 16y ago
sshah 16y ago
JAVA handled by the micro managers. That means each new feature will be nicely documented first...in a contract. It will go through a rigorous due diligence process, the basic questions being 'Whats in it for Oracle', 'Does it help our performance', etc. Oracle makes good enough software but at a slow pace. Gosling's not going to say 'I am really worried about JAVA and chances are it may not evolve'. But I think its quite clear from this interview.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  You obviously make the risky assumption the managers in question know how to properly document and develop software.
rbanffy 16y ago
I love the way Gosling uses "financial realities" as a delicate euphemism for "poor management"...
adharmad 16y ago
From the article: "All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone." It need not have come to that if they had used their "ability to decide" in managing Sun properly. You cannot hang your hat for very long on "we made good software but were unable to sell it".
- hga 16y ago
  And then there's the interminable delay in Java 7. In this case, "made", as in the past tense of "make" is the operative word. As I noted elsewhere, I'm not sure Oracle wanted to give Gosling and his peers decision making authority (let alone retain them) based on their recent preformance.
VladRussian 16y ago
a lot of Sun's prima donnas didn't make it in Oracle wolf pack. They had their day at Sun (it was an unbelievable feast during plague), and it resulted in the failure of the company on all fronts, business and engineering, software and hardware.
- bcantrill 16y ago
  More accurately, we (for there are many of us) realized that we could go solve much more interesting problems elsewhere -- and in a much better environment besides. Why would anyone wish to suffer at a technically mediocre company when there are so many interesting problems yet to solve?
  - VladRussian 16y ago
    O-o-o-o-h! who can forgot this one. The technical brilliance of scattering profiler calls across Solaris sources (which endeavor took enormous engineering and marketing budgets at the time when Solaris was eaten alive by Linux) is, no doubt, a sound platform to "mediocrate" a company whose products in a highly competitive marketplace are among the leaders, technically and commercially (people actually pay to use them, whereis Sun had trouble convincing people to use its products, in particular Solaris, even for free) Apples to apples - Oracle DB has excellent profiler capabilities and even useful tools around it. Of course, in this day and age, excellent profiler capabilities and tools is just a normal must-have, a technical mediocracy and nowhere a sign of technical brilliance. Great, the more of "we (for there are many of us) realized that we could go solve much more interesting problems elsewhere", the less chances for the Oracle server to suffer the fate of Solaris.
paramendra 16y ago
This is just Larry "consolidating." (Larryspeak) http://goo.gl/fb/gNsvQ http://goo.gl/fb/gNsvQ
fondue 16y ago
“All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” Probably the best thing to happen as the decision makers managed to decide Sun to the selling block.
strait 16y ago
I'm wondering what happened to the real mastermind, Guy Steele.
- hga 16y ago
  Heh. Nah, he was brought in after Java was going to help write the language definition document, given his fantastic demonstrated ability to do this: Scheme, co-author of the best one for C, Common Lisp. He's now working on Fortress, a HPC language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_languag...). As far as I know, people doing research are still happy (enough), employed, etc., e.g. that project is still going with the most recent release a month and a half ago and the Maxine JVM in Java was fine as of the time Oracle sued Google, when I stopped paying attention to it.
zvrba 16y ago
Personally, I think that Gosling got what he deserved considering the pain he inflicted on myriads of developers with Java. (Yes, there are some nice technologies in the Java platform. But Java language is not one of them.)

262 points by 10ren 16y ago

From the middle of the article: "Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was that although they said they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs.” That's interesting, given that Gosling now decides to quit 'of his own accord', which is probably a lot cheaper than to lay someone off. Technically Oracle may not lay people off that readily, but I don't see how you could interpret Goslings treatment in any way but to force him out of the company. He had his compensation reduced, they clipped his wings and on top of all that used him to act at being a trained parrot.

jacksonh 16y ago
Gosling's layoff concerns were probably more about his friends and the people that worked for him.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Yes, but if they treat him like this I can't see people lower on the totem pole being treated much better, I'd rather expect the opposite.
  - mseebach 16y ago
    I think the implied trade-off is between "IBM axes former SUN-division Foo, 5000 fired" and "Stuck in an unpleasant, but decently paid, job with benefits and no particular obligation not to just pack up and leave when a better opportunity comes along."
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Oracle has already fired close to 7,000 people of the original 27,000 that were part of the merger, in June they announced a further 1,000 people to be thrown out but at the same time said they would hire 2,000 new ones mostly for the sales division. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6536G820100604 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6536G820100604 I don't see how IBM could have done much worse, and I think that Java would have fared a lot better under IBM, which in the longer term would have probably meant more rather than less job security for the people working near Gosling. If he was talking about the company as a whole IBM would have had to fire more than 8,000 people to date do be doing as bad for the employees as Oracle did, now of course we'll never know so we can't really make any statements about that but I find it hard to conceive of it being so bad. IBM is very image conscious and I think they would have had a hard time murdering the core team around java at this clip, let alone destroying the technical core of Sun and replacing it with 'sales'.
      - gamble 16y ago
        IBM has a policy of shipping as many jobs overseas as can be managed. They've moved tens of thousands in the last decade. What I've heard from friends suggests that it's not a pleasant environment for rank-and-file employees. AFAIK, Oracle doesn't have the same zest for shipping jobs overseas.
      - Tamerlin 16y ago
        IBM's done worse before. In the late 90's my father was part of a first round of IBM layoffs -- in which they cut 6000 jobs... in Dutchess County, New York. That was the <i>first round</i> of layoffs. Another few thousand got cut a year so later. And I don't know how many they cut outside of Dutchess County...
        zacharycohn 16y ago
        Were they closing down the facility in Dutchess County? How big was it?
        16y ago
  - Gobiner 16y ago
    It's pretty easy to imagine that when Gosling was employed by Sun, he enjoyed significant power to shape his own job. Under Oracle, he clearly did not have the power to make his own job into what he wanted. It's not much of a stretch to believe that lower-tier technical staff didn't have that power to begin with, and hence did not feel the same sting of new management.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Yes, that's probably very true, in part this is Gosling being a similar sized fish in a much larger pond. But if I compare that to google where there are lots of 'names' from just about every era of computing working and being reasonably happy I can't help but notice the contrast. That changes the atmosphere of the place and that definitely does filter down to lower levels.
whatusername 16y ago
IBM and SUN had tons of competing products. They compete in: OS's - Solaris vs AIX; Hardware - Sun's Low end x86 vs systemX, SPARC vs Power, Disk Storage, Tape Storage; And probably a bunch more I can't think of. Oracle and SUN weren't really competitors in many spaces. So IBM would have been better for Gosling -- but there was more hope for the rest of the employees at Oracle.

davidw 16y ago

Some quotes: > Oracle did not have a notion of a senior engineer or at least one equivalent to Gosling’s grade at Sun, where he was a fellow. “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said. Says something about how they value technical people. > The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn’t save any money because the money had been spent – so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up because it wasn’t the ‘Oracle Way.’ On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million

jacquesm 16y ago
> Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million That's just Larry's favorite toy, I'd imagine the IRS to be interested in that as a deferred payment rather than Oracles shareholders, whatever floats Larry's boat (pun intended) is fine with them, as long as he delivers.
- jonknee 16y ago
  IIRC Oracle doesn't pay anything, they're name is just on the boat because Ellison wants it to be. He's the one paying for it. But I'm sure the boat is actually owned by a corporation that gets its own write offs.
  - gaius 16y ago
    It's owned by BMW Oracle Racing, which is a separate company whose mission is essentially the same as an F1 team's - get their sponsor's names in everyone's minds by winning stuff on TV.
yellowbkpk 16y ago
One of the reasons I left GE was because there was no notion of a senior engineer in the software field (there are senior science positions in the research divisions). To go beyond "Software Engineer" you had to step into a managerial role and away from doing any software engineering. This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.

paulbaumgart 16y ago

A lot of big software companies seem to put significant effort into maintaining a good relationship with the developer/technical community, presumably in large part to keep the recruitment pipeline (especially of top people) flowing along. Oracle, by contrast, doesn't seem to give a shit and gets away with it[1]. Why? [1] http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1285185600000&chddm=494615&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:ORCL&ntsp=0 http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

_delirium 16y ago
I don't know much about this sector, but how does Oracle compare to its direct competitors? E.g. is SAP friendlier with the developer/technical community?
- mhd 16y ago
  IBM with its DB2 product is a direct competitor, and seems to do a bit better, blue suits & company hymns notwithstanding. SAP is a special case, as it has a more limited target audience. The financial environment has a heavy, erm, taint on the typical SAP developer. Most of them are in it for the money, so I don't think a lot of them care all that much. College students in Germany often joke about selling your soul to become a SAP consultant… Whereas most Oracle developers or DBAs I've met are still more engineers than business types. Some companies just don't need a flourishing developer community. I think Oracle – especially after buying Sun – isn't one where this would seem advisable, but apparently they think different. Wonder how that will work out…
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  Other than the aforementioned DB2, the only other competitor out there for Oracle is SQL Server. That has some big customers -- a large part of Disney's online infrastructure relies on SQL Server, for example.
  - dagw 16y ago
    Oracle the database isn't really Oracle's main product. They're real product is a bunch of industry specific applications and middleware (and related consulting services) that happens to need a Oracle database to run. So as such they're not really directly competing with SQL server (or postgres or whatever)

hopeless 16y ago

Oracle sounds as bad a company internally as externally. I'm hugely grateful that I've found other languages, frameworks and databases to base my career on and minimise Oracle's involvement in my life. Although I never worked for them, I loved the hardware and software output from Sun. It was good to have them in the tech ecosystem. I can't say the same about Oracle.

absconditus 16y ago

Darryl K. Taft is a horrible writer.

skullsplitter 16y ago
For real, "That bent Gosling’s resolve like a wishbone in the hands of two eager siblings in mid-pull after Thanksgiving dinner, but even that didn’t break it."
- flatline 16y ago
  And later - I'm not sure what I was actually reading about for half the article: "But unlike Oracle, Davis and the Raiders have not had a winning season for awhile – not since my Baltimore Ravens flattened their hopes and the shoulder of quarterback Rich Gannon after a vicious pancake tackle by Tony Siragusa on the way to a Ravens’ Super Bowl winning season in 2001."
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- aaronbrethorst 16y ago
  Yeah, I bet Franklin W. Dixon could write better copy ;-) (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1705714 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1705714)

10ren 16y ago

Oracle has brilliant opportunities at the moment: they own a great processor (Sparc) that they could closely integrate with their database, application software and even Java... and (finally!) give IBM a run for their money. They have the cool and fast technology of both Sun's JVM and BEA's JVM (JRockit). They have acquired other brilliant technologies, and have in practice endless resources to acquire more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/index.html http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/index.html But... although it's simple to appreciate the advantages of combining technologies, it's very very hard to actually do. For example, the IBM 360 project, of a series of machines of increasing power (and price), that were all compatible, so customers could upgrade, is a simple idea. But implementing this was a bet-the-company project, it was celebrated as an incredible, miraculous achievement, and the lessons learnt from it remain popular to this day (The Mythical Man Month, by the leader of the 360 project, Fred Brooks.) To pull off these technical feats, you need the public superstar developers, but also the hidden superstar developers (the x100 coders; the people who, after working closely with them for a while, you observe, oh that guy's a genius); and then the x10 coders, who want to hang out with the geniuses and learn from them. It's places like HP used to be, where Woz wanted to work, at almost all costs (Woz himself being a x100 guy.) If you only have x5 or x7 coders; and if you don't support them (with infrastructure, secretarial etc - not just compensation, adequate decision-making power, and some kind of recognition.), then, well, you can't do these technical feats. You may seek but not find; ask but it shall not be given; knock but it shall not be opened. Though this is not a disruptive issue, the same factors occur of the difficulty for an established successful company to change its culture and business architecture. And Oracle doesn't want to change anyway.

Tamerlin 16y ago
" they own a great processor (Sparc)" I'm not so sure about that. For years x86 has been chewing up the market for Sparc processors, and one of the reasons that Sun had such poor finances is that it was selling x86-based servers more than Sparc based servers (they cost considerably less, and perform better). Fujutsu's Sparc implementation significantly outperforms Sun's. Contemporary Xeons outperform both these days. Besides, Sun has had a long history of massive screwups -- and they put "don't tell anyone we screwed up" clauses in their support contracts. One company just gave up when they got their UltraSPARC3 rig, found that not only was it not nearly performant enough to meet expectations, but also in order for it to function reliably, they had to disable the 2nd level cache on every CPU, or else a cache glitch would bring down the entire server (32 procs). It's not a great processor. It hasn't been for a long time. Sun has been the "flock of chickens" vs the POWER "bull" as a result.

ataranto 16y ago

"But unlike Oracle, Davis and the Raiders have not had a winning season for awhile – not since my Baltimore Ravens flattened their hopes and the shoulder of quarterback Rich Gannon after a vicious pancake tackle by Tony Siragusa on the way to a Ravens’ Super Bowl winning season in 2001." The Raiders were 11-5 the next year (2002) and went to the Super Bowl.

shoover 16y ago
Good point, but after THAT... horrors.
philwelch 16y ago
By "in 2001" he actually means the 2001 Super Bowl, so the 2000 season. The 2001 season was a Super Bowl winning season for the Patriots.

Astro9k 16y ago

It's interesting that a pay cut and a down-grade in title isn't what did it but that their marginalization of his input and control is what pushed him over the edge.

cageface 16y ago

So where does a guy like Gosling go now? Google seems to be serving the role that Bell Labs once did in giving all the top technical dogs a big playground but other than that it's hard to guess where he might fit in.

va_coder 16y ago

I sympathize with all the great Sun engineers that got a bad deal, but didn't Sun do poorly from an investor perspective? And isn't that important? As much as I really hate Oracle (I'm a programmer and don't like their products), they do really well for investors. They make fat profits each quarter. I don't really understand why - why people buy their overpriced, complex products - but they do.

wh-uws 16y ago
I can answer that one... their pointy haired bosses read the ads in the airports and business magazines that say "98% of Fortune 500 companies" use Oracle
tsotha 16y ago
The sales organization gets priority in Oracle. They're never going to start a project by asking "what would be cool?", but rather "what do our customers want?". Not the path to the most technically satisfying jobs, but companies like that stand a better chance of making money. I've worked at a few (smaller) software companies, and from what I can tell the ones that go out of business do so because they make really cool products that either 1) don't get connected to the right customers or 2) are missing some critical feature customers need because developers didn't understand the business space. Both problems are the result of a poor or unsupported sales organization. As a technical guy I get irritated by the sales people as much as anyone else, especially when they try to promise away my nights or weekends. But a software company won't survive without them. Based on my own experience I'd say the most successful companies could better be described as sales organizations that do software instead of software companies that do sales.
- va_coder 16y ago
  I agree. I also think managers with discipline and ok intelligence are better than managers that are really intelligent with little discipline. The disciplined managers focus on what needs to get done and do it. (The don't spend part of their day reading HN ;)
dagw 16y ago

sshah 16y ago

JAVA handled by the micro managers. That means each new feature will be nicely documented first...in a contract. It will go through a rigorous due diligence process, the basic questions being 'Whats in it for Oracle', 'Does it help our performance', etc. Oracle makes good enough software but at a slow pace. Gosling's not going to say 'I am really worried about JAVA and chances are it may not evolve'. But I think its quite clear from this interview.

rbanffy 16y ago
You obviously make the risky assumption the managers in question know how to properly document and develop software.

rbanffy 16y ago

I love the way Gosling uses "financial realities" as a delicate euphemism for "poor management"...

adharmad 16y ago

From the article: "All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone." It need not have come to that if they had used their "ability to decide" in managing Sun properly. You cannot hang your hat for very long on "we made good software but were unable to sell it".

hga 16y ago
And then there's the interminable delay in Java 7. In this case, "made", as in the past tense of "make" is the operative word. As I noted elsewhere, I'm not sure Oracle wanted to give Gosling and his peers decision making authority (let alone retain them) based on their recent preformance.

VladRussian 16y ago

a lot of Sun's prima donnas didn't make it in Oracle wolf pack. They had their day at Sun (it was an unbelievable feast during plague), and it resulted in the failure of the company on all fronts, business and engineering, software and hardware.

bcantrill 16y ago
More accurately, we (for there are many of us) realized that we could go solve much more interesting problems elsewhere -- and in a much better environment besides. Why would anyone wish to suffer at a technically mediocre company when there are so many interesting problems yet to solve?
- VladRussian 16y ago
  O-o-o-o-h! who can forgot this one. The technical brilliance of scattering profiler calls across Solaris sources (which endeavor took enormous engineering and marketing budgets at the time when Solaris was eaten alive by Linux) is, no doubt, a sound platform to "mediocrate" a company whose products in a highly competitive marketplace are among the leaders, technically and commercially (people actually pay to use them, whereis Sun had trouble convincing people to use its products, in particular Solaris, even for free) Apples to apples - Oracle DB has excellent profiler capabilities and even useful tools around it. Of course, in this day and age, excellent profiler capabilities and tools is just a normal must-have, a technical mediocracy and nowhere a sign of technical brilliance. Great, the more of "we (for there are many of us) realized that we could go solve much more interesting problems elsewhere", the less chances for the Oracle server to suffer the fate of Solaris.

paramendra 16y ago

This is just Larry "consolidating." (Larryspeak) http://goo.gl/fb/gNsvQ http://goo.gl/fb/gNsvQ

fondue 16y ago

“All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” Probably the best thing to happen as the decision makers managed to decide Sun to the selling block.

strait 16y ago

I'm wondering what happened to the real mastermind, Guy Steele.

hga 16y ago
Heh. Nah, he was brought in after Java was going to help write the language definition document, given his fantastic demonstrated ability to do this: Scheme, co-author of the best one for C, Common Lisp. He's now working on Fortress, a HPC language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_languag...). As far as I know, people doing research are still happy (enough), employed, etc., e.g. that project is still going with the most recent release a month and a half ago and the Maxine JVM in Java was fine as of the time Oracle sued Google, when I stopped paying attention to it.

zvrba 16y ago

Personally, I think that Gosling got what he deserved considering the pain he inflicted on myriads of developers with Java. (Yes, there are some nice technologies in the Java platform. But Java language is not one of them.)