Sun made $200 billion of revenue over 28 years. Yes, Sun missed opportunities -- but (as someone who worked at Sun during the internet boom) Sun definitely took advantage of plenty of them. Or are you making the case that Sun's technological output was so substantial that the $200 billion over the nearly three decades represents a "bigger missed opportunity in business than Docker"?
I would argue that Sun's innovative output was a much larger missed opportunity than anything Docker has developed (then again, hindsight is 20-20). Yes, Docker has a lot of hype and has "brought containers to the masses" but I would argue it's nowhere near as revolutionary as ZFS/Zones/DTrace/etc. If I had been born 10-15 years earlier, I would've hoped to work for Sun. I've never wished to work for Docker.
As someone who maintains the container runtime underlying Docker (and contributes all over the stack), in my view there is a lot more innovative "core" engineering happening in the LXC/LXD camp than in the Docker camp. There are far more kernel patches coming out of LXC (and more kernel maintainers developing LXC) than have come out of Docker. And let's not forget, LXC came first to modern Linux containers. There is a lot of work going into Docker, but I guess I put more of an emphasis on OS engineering to determine who more innovative engineering on systems tools.
(Yes, there is Kubernetes but that's not a Docker project. If anything, Swarm emphasises my point. LXD has clustering too and they support real live migration between cluster nodes -- though CRIU has historically been a bit hairy.)
It always felt to me like Sun had great ideas and vision but was too early or idealistic. Seems like they would have missed at least $200 billion in revenue with follow through. Sun Grid is the AWS that never was. Chromebooks are the new Sun Rays.
In 1999 I wanted to buy a Sun SPARCstation 5 (I worked with those). Was fabulous how that machine never blocked, was super-stable, and fast.
At that time I had a linux PC box (red hat) at home, with IDE and PATA (if I remember correctly) it was really difficult for the hardware to perform.
The were good machines, but they were stupidly expensive a that time. The same with SGI. I remember being quoted $18,000 for equivalent amount of memory I had just put in a linux box of my own for about $300. Sure, it wasn't really apples to apples ... but still. Intel based machines were eating their lunch for good reason.
Both sun and sgi had business models built around premium margins and couldn’t adapt the the mammals underfoot. This phenomenon is one of the things that The Innovator’s Dilemma got right.
Apple’s in a slightly different position in that they bank a more profit sun/sgi ever did and are pretty aggressive on COGS so if/when they lose their exalted position they will have a lot more room to maneuver. This is how Microsoft managed to survive its sag (decline is too strong anword) towards irrelevance and recover.
IBM was in the same situation as Microsoft but though Gerstner managed to right the ship, his successors were not able to re-ignite growth (to mix metaphors)
