Comment Faster, better, cheaper? (Score 1) 339
What occurs to me is that 15-20 years ago, when Sun iron dominated Wall Street, is that all the Sparcstations came IIRC with 10baseT on the motherboard, and I don't recall there being faster NICs available. And even if there were, in a lot of cases all the machines slots were populated with graphics cards.
Then three things all sort of happened around the same time: Linux (kernel and user land) reached a level of maturity and stability, inexpensive 100baseT and later 1000baseT NICs became available, and Intel closed the CISC/RISC performance gap. I don't know when Sun started shipping faster networking, but if the only way to get it was to buy a whole new machine, as opposed to plugging in a $30 NIC, it isn't hard to imagine which way the purchasing decision would go, even for money-is-no-object Wall Street.
No surprise then that Linux whupped Solaris' butt. Sun didn't help things by dawdling on fixing known Solaris performance problems. By the time Sun fixed them it was too late; Linux had already gained a foothold.