When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.
Later, in grad school I went to work at a startup… google. For me it recaptured everything I liked about Sun. And had the same CEO.
> They didn't understand horizontal scaling
What of Jini, JavaSpaces / Linda, JXTA, "grid computing"?
Were they too early? Dismissed as (Bill Joy's) hobby projects?
At the time, I was very enthusiastic. Especiall grid computing. So much so that when cloud computing arrived, I couldn't recognize the sea change. Square peg, round hole.
We even POC'd some Jini support. Demo'd for hardware manufacturers, customers, our dealer channel. Customers loved the idea.
But like UPnP, Jini failed to get traction.
As for JXTA (peer-to-peer), although I didn't gave any skin in that gane, I really expected it to vecome the norm. eg My brother (for his ISP) POC'd video delivery in anticipation. But that got mooted pretty quick.
Arguably, AWS Lambda (et al) was is "dumb" grid (run anywhere in asandbox) and the OpenClaw agentic (madness) is the "evil" incarnation. (I'm aware of efforts like Emerald AI (et al) to make a "smart" grid.)
DHTs—Chord paper was 2001—started popping up. The big software vendors looked at the architectural (if not legal) success of Napster & the other P2P networks and were invested in finding legitimate applications. Open standards were seeing real adoption left and right.
But it didn’t happen. Maybe simultaneously too late in the Internet’s evolution and too early.
Too late because the big kids were involved. Especially Microsoft, who would never allow any standard they couldn’t EEE to emerge. Too early because the players like Google who later could muscle through core infrastructure standards weren’t there yet.
And now it’s likely too late, with mobile embedding a client-server model with the weight of 10B devices.