Here is my experience with Sun and why they failed in the 00s: Linux

The only way you could get people with Solaris experience was to hire people from colleges where students had access to expensive hard to access servers. This limited the number of people a company could hire to handle their Solaris servers.

I remember being told by the now forgotten snap.com—back when snap.com was a web portal business owned by NBC (these days it’s owned by Snapchat but is a completely different company)—to pound sand because I had Linux but not Solaris experience. There was a certain elitism among Solaris users at the time that Linux was a toy operating system. [1]

I already knew that wasn’t true; I remember, before the height of the dot-com wave, installing Linux on my desktop PC at work because the Sun servers we logged in to to run X applications were overloaded and difficult to access, so I just had a local instance of Slackware (and later on RedHat) so I could run X applications locally and just telnet in to the Sun servers, which was a good deal faster.

A few years after my unpleasant experience being interviewed by the NBC portal incarnation of snap.com, I saw that the company folded and went under—which didn’t surprise me because they weren’t being economical about the servers they were running. The company I was at was running a couple of Dell RedHat Linux servers, which kept us on the Internet cheaply and reliably.

It didn’t surprise me that Linux soon overtook Solaris and ate them for breakfast.

[1] Bryan Cantrill—the person who wrote the blog this thread is about—infamously said “Have you ever kissed a girl” to a Linux Kernel developer who explained why Linux was more efficient that Solaris on Sparc (and was easier to get support for); this is the prime example of the snobbishness Sun users had at the time.

[2] https://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/kissedagirl.html