The Fall of Sun Microsystems

                Sun Microsystem is a company that was founded in February 24, 1982. In January 27, 2010 it was bought by the Oracle Corporation for the hefty sum of 7.4 billion dollars. Since then it merged with Oracle USA, and became Oracle America. The company sold computers, computer software, information technology services and computer components. At its peak, the company had its headquarters in Santa Clara in the state of California and it employed 38,600 people. The Sun’s founders were Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy.

                Sun Microsystem also produced workstations and computer servers using its very own SPARC processors. They also used the Xeon processor from Intel and AMD’s Opteron processor. The company’s first Unix system was called the Sun-1, and it was designed by Andy Bechtolsheim. He designed this workstation as a Stanford University Network project. It had a Motorola 68000 processor and an integrated Memory management unit, that was able to support Unix. He used spare parts that he found in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford to build the very first ones. The companies name Sun comes from the initials of Stanford University Network.

                Sun Microsystem demise was caused by the dot-com bubble. The company began making a lot more money, the price of its shares rising dramatically. In this time the company began investing in more facilities and hiring more employees. This was in fact due to legitimate demand, but a lot of it was investments in new web companies that would eventually go bankrupt. The year 2000 was the begging of the end. The dot-com bubble burst, and Sun suffered a huge blow. A lot of its customers no longer needed high-end servers. After several quarters of losses, executives began to leave the firm, a lot of lay-off where made as well as other cost cuts were made.