@Jim - Irony of Apple, NeXT, Steve Jobs, Scott McNealy, and SUN in your same response

Jim said, "Well HP also has had a tool on HP-UX for a long time that can do at least as much as dtrace if you know how to use it."

One could say that any platform that has had "truss" could do it, but these tools are a far cry from DTrace.

Jim said, "As for Sun, many people have argued that the biggest problem they've had for more than a decade is Scott McNealy."

Replacing Scott McNealy with Jonathan Ian Schwartz was a strategic move that turned SUN to the opposite direction:

- stop competing with SPARC on desktops, for workstations

- stop charging for software, give it away for free

- stop giving away patches for free, charge maintenance fees

- stop giving away service manuals for free, charge maintenance fees

- stop competing with other CPU vendors, embrace them and resell their products

The downward spiral (during Scott's time) continued, under SUN's completely new direction (during Jonathan's time.)

People suggest new management, but I don't really understand what that would bring, since such a radical departure from Scott McNealy has already been brought to fruition. I would suggest that new management is not necessarily what is needed, but more risk-taking and flexibility to bring developments faster to market, with a key creative (not bean-counter) person to keep the marketing theme straight. The T series was an example of a very creative product.

Jim said, "There was a reason why Jobs was fired from Apple. And he destroyed NeXT. It remains to be seen if his charisma can save Apple."

Apple took a downward spiral during (primarily due to a delayed release of newer high-speed products) & after Steve Jobs left. Collaborations with IBM and investments (which never became reality) with multiple companies into Taligent (to basically compete with what Steve Jobs implemented in NeXT and what Microsoft was trying to develop, but also never really came to fruition) sapped resources. It was not until NeXT was purchased by Apple did they regain their footing with producing viable (by market standards) OS and Hardware.

In short, Steve Jobs did not destroy NeXT, he CREATED NeXT, brought into Apple everything that was NeXT, where Apple could market it (instead of the ghost-ware Apple and Microsoft was working on, that was never really brought to market.) Apple is clearly a successful company, under Steve Jobs, again, with the NeXT/OSX system in all of their PC's as well as embedded iPhone's.

Jim said, "But maybe he learned some lessons during his exile. Sun just lost their vision."

Steve Jobs informed the Apple board of directors what he was doing: he took with him various Apple developers and started NeXT. Clearly, it did not take long for Steve to produce a hardware and software product to his vision, a vision not clearly shared by Apple.

Apple, during Steve's self-imposed exile, had become a corporate monstrosity, which hindered bringing creative products to market (quickly.) When Steve left, he remedied many of these issues, but the hardware component carried too much investment and cost, to make a reasonable return and Motorola did not provide 680x0 chips to out-perform the market on a quick enough basis.

One might consider the failure of Motorola (now FreeScale) to invest in the 680x0 as the primary reasons for the pressures on Apple and NeXT (as well as multiple other workstation vendors, who had all moved to various RISC architectures.)

One might also consider the fragmentation of CPU development resources across so many vendors (formerly sharing a common 680x0 architecture) to have doomed those individual vendors. 680x0 -> SPARC, ALPHA, MIPS, POWER, PA-RISC

If anyone would have been able to hold those vendors together, it could have been Motorola/Freescale (since this was the common link)... if they were able to supply the required volume of 68K CISC or 88K RISC chips to the vendors.

It is possible that the lesson learned by Steve Jobs was the migration to Intel, as he had done with NeXT, when he had moved from hardware only to a hybrid hardware/software model, shed the (68K) hardware manufacturing, and moved into a (multi-vendor 68K, PowerPC, PA-RISC, SPARC, x86) software development model for NeXT.

What is really ironic... your mentioning Apple, NeXT, Steve Jobs, Scott McNealy, and SUN in the same response.

- Apple acquired NeXT to freshen Apple, and NeXT co-founder Steve Jobs rose to rank of CEO, replacing the CEO who acquired them.

- SUN acquired Lighthouse Design Ltd. to freshen SUN, and Lighthouse co-founder Jonathan Schwartz rose to rank of CEO, replacing the CEO who acquired them.