Love your customers

1/2/2026 at 2:05:26 AM

It turns out that you don’t have to love your customers to make money. Abuse is the end state of most products once they’ve reached a point where there are few if any customers left to enthrall but still the world demands ever greater profit. VMware was and is there. Intel too actually.

by bfrog

1/1/2026 at 8:24:45 PM

Love you Bryan, but:

> Companies that have disdain for their own customers will be reviled in return. Such companies may be able to thrive in the short term, but they do not endure in the limit.

Oracle has endured nearly 50 years. Sun did not endure.

I don't want to live in a world where one of the most successful and widespread corporate strategies is also disturbingly un-humanistic, but we're never going to find a better way unless our mental models for how customer relationships map to business success actually align with reality.

by Centigonal

1/1/2026 at 10:03:12 PM

Appreciate the love, but I think you are drawing the wrong conclusion here: Sun failed to endure not because it loved its customers, but to the contrary because it lost track of them: the company was disinterested in the mechanics of running a business.[0]

As for Oracle and its putative endurance, I would liken it to the Berlin Wall: despite the seeming permanence, it is in fact an artifact that history will be eager to forget when given the opportunity.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033

by bcantrill

1/2/2026 at 1:45:35 AM

Per above, it seems like Sun had a core architectural, technical, and engineering failure with SPARC failing to keep pace with x86, and a business failure dealing with the fallout:

> x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.)

> we spent too much time trying to help save microprocessor management from an unmitigated disaster of their own creation (UltraSPARC-III, cruelly code named "Cheetah"

In contrast, HP mostly (though it eventually split into two companies) managed to survive Itanium and compete with Dell. IBM continued to evolve Power and its other architectures and still sells AIX as well as Linux systems. Cray still exists as part of HPE. Apple migrated from PowerPC to x86 before hitting a home run with their own version of ARM.

In an alternate timeline, I imagine Sun still existing as an independent company and being the leader in RISC-V systems. But I guess Oxide is something of a successor?

by musicale

1/2/2026 at 2:00:35 AM

Sun being the leader in RISC-V systems

If Sun couldn't design a good SPARC processor then they couldn't design a good RISC-V processor either. x86 was really their only hope but they didn't succeed there either, maybe because of the same old over-engineering.

by wmf

1/2/2026 at 2:24:27 AM

Well, RISC-V is likely easier to implement efficiently than SPARC (no register windows, etc.) and has many of the same RISC-derived advantages.

Sun had some very smart people (what is Marc Tremblay doing at Microsoft btw?), and they could also have acquired more of them, perhaps like Apple acquiring PA Semi or Qualcomm acquiring Nuvia.

Also I wonder what might have happened if OpenSPARC had happened earlier, been more open, etc. (Indeed, a main reason why RISC-V exists is that there were IP issues with other architectures.)

by musicale

1/2/2026 at 2:02:07 AM

> Companies that have disdain for their own customers ... do not endure in the limit.

This is a very common sort of wishful thinking that lets people bypass hard decisions. You create a company that loves its customers and employees and vice versa because you want to run a company that way. There are plenty of examples showing it's possible to run a sustainable business that way, and also plenty of counter-examples. There's no guarantee that it leads to business success or maximizes profits, it's just a choice you make.

by StellarScience

1/1/2026 at 8:48:39 PM

No love for customers will compensate for a missing strategic moat. Sun placed its hopes on vertically integrated hardware + proprietary OS. Oracle bet on software, that once installed, had extremely high switching costs (similar to SAP). Strategy >> Love.

by baxtr

1/1/2026 at 8:47:03 PM

The next sentence is more defensible:

>> Certainly, these companies not endure as innovators: when coercion is your business model, innovation is not merely unnecessary but actively antithetical.

Oracle and VMware do seem like just rent seekers. I'm sure those rents do pay for plenty of nice things, but it's really hard for me to ever understand Oracle or VMware as an "innovator", beyond their initial innovations (their flagship DB, x86 virtualization).

> Oracle has endured nearly 50 years. Sun did not endure.

IMHO it's perfectly fine for companies to live well, and then be sold. AFAIAC persistence is only proof of persistence. Sun created plenty of wealth/millionaires too. And, by Bryan's lights, it did so mostly ethically. That's a good life.

by mustache_kimono

1/1/2026 at 9:02:58 PM

I think that companies like Oracle and Broadcom begin to resemble specialized private equity firms: they acquire innovative companies that have scaled to a level that they're familiar with. The acquirer then enforces "business discipline" and unlocks efficiencies (mainly this means leveraging the acquirer's existing connections with their customer base to cross-sell licenses, raising prices to the highest possible level their customers can sustain, and laying off/transferring redundant positions or positions not directly tied to revenue generation). This lasts 3-10 years until the market develops a lower-cost enterprise-ready alternative that starts to erode the captive customer base, but in that time these companies have collected enough rents to acquire another set of smaller companies and repeat the process.

by Centigonal

1/1/2026 at 9:09:44 PM

> I think that companies like Oracle, SAP, and Broadcom begin to resemble specialized private equity firms

This is an entirely fair/accurate. I suppose what I am getting at is that these are just 2 different business models, and, the world can sustain a multitude of business models. There need not be only one (har har).

It's also fair to believe there is a moral dimension to one's own model which doesn't extract maximum value from the customer. Because IMHO "let's kick them in the dicks again" isn't an especially likable model, even if it is successful, and it's fair to avoid doing business with such people.

Imagine trying to sell your partners on doing business with Broadcom. If your core principle is "Broadcom needs to be around in 10 years", maybe the persistence/"kick them in the dicks" model is appealing, but otherwise, its fair for their competitors/Oxide to point out how awful dealing with a corporate sociopath might be.

by mustache_kimono

1/1/2026 at 9:37:15 PM

Yeah, I agree with all of that. Extractive behemoths like Oracle couldn't exist without innovators like Oxide (well, not exactly Oxide since I doubt they'd sell to an Oracle, but you know what I mean).

There are plenty of customers that jump into deals with e.g. Oracle for a variety of reasons, and it's definitely worthwhile to spread the news far and wide about how difficult it is to work with these companies, doubly so if you're ideologically and economically competing with them.

I guess my point is that it's worthwhile to spend time understanding why this business model works in spite of all the shittiness, since the "hoping their poor treatment of customers will blow back on them" approach hasn't worked yet. I'm also fixating on the bad here, because I look at "both kind and nasty business models can succeed" and reflexively respond with "but why do the nasty ones succeed?"

by Centigonal

1/2/2026 at 1:15:27 AM

Literally clicked to the comments to say exactly this. While I agree with the overall sentiment of the piece, this statement destroys the author's credibility.

by amarghose

1/1/2026 at 10:52:34 PM

> Oracle has endured nearly 50 years.

CIA contractors be like that sometimes.

by themafia

1/2/2026 at 2:20:59 AM

Thank you Bryan for writing this. I’m not American, but the behaviour Bryan is calling out is in my opinion why American capitalism is in decline.

When an entity parts with their money for your product or services it is a recognition of the value you provide to them. There is symbiosis here. When you lose track of this, you end up with cronyism.

Ultimately, for the individual, it’s a matter of how you want to die. You either aim to have a fat bank account, or you aim to have a fantastic adventure making things you want to see in the world happen.

I think it’s pretty clear what Mr. Cantrill has chosen.

by sxzygz

1/2/2026 at 1:24:27 AM

>suing your customers is gross

It's not gross, lawsuits are how you keep both parties honest. If you never sue your customers you are letting them walk over you and exploit you.

by charcircuit

1/2/2026 at 1:41:47 AM

Nothing increases NPS like threatening to sue people who want to give you money. :D

by shimman

1/1/2026 at 11:14:48 PM

I work in infrastructure at one of the players in the lawsuits, I won't mention which one. Make no mistake, we are moving out of broadcom. We're not crawling back. There is enough technical skills to maneuver large infrastructure projects and cloud engineering. Our exit strategy began over a year and half ago. In hindsight it should have begun 8 years earlier after similar pricing issues with Wiley Introscope (which broadcom also acquired). But better late than never.

by throwmeaway-x1

1/1/2026 at 9:14:32 AM

Odd framing for the opposite of “holding customers hostage” - I don’t think people want or need to be loved by their enterprise software.

by vintagevibe

1/1/2026 at 12:49:10 PM

> I don’t think people want or need to be loved by their enterprise software.

I absolutely want a good partnership with the people who make my enterprise software. If I end up loving one of them, even better. However, paying Oracle, for example, and constantly fearing being sued sounds more like domestic violence, a bit like #WhyIStayed

by BSDobelix

1/1/2026 at 12:26:29 PM

I don't think they are looking to date eachother. I think rather what they mean is:

When 2 enterprises love eachother very much,they don't sue eachother, they don't lie and tell customers they are the only one having this problem and most importantly,they stay together in a partnership and maybe work together to improve the product.

Valuable advice I once received was: sales is about trust, and this kind of breaks that. I think that the sane customer would explore option to migrate their services to other things.

by joa-

1/1/2026 at 3:58:16 PM

I admire Bryan and Oxide but outing your former coworker’s private conversation with you because they said something you didn’t like on email is, to use Bryan’s terminology, “gross.”

How many former Sun folks are in senior engineering management at Broadcom? Might as well have just posted the person’s name.

by eduction

1/1/2026 at 9:53:16 PM

The name is beside the point -- and their character outs them anyway. To be clear, this was a conversation I didn't initiate (they came into my DMs, going off half-cocked about several technical aspects of Oxide that they did not understand), and they made no effort to hide their disposition. We probably disagree on this, but I don't believe that there's a basis for an assumption of privacy here (I'm not your priest, rabbi, lawyer, spouse, etc.) -- and anyone who knows me would know that I'm not the person to be confessing these kinds of sins to anyway.

by bcantrill

1/2/2026 at 6:25:36 AM

Bryan, if I may ask, what was the purpose of this LinkedIn / blog post?

Acknowledging that I don’t know you, and that I haven’t seen this private conversation, this post definitely reads like you just wanted to put a former colleague on blast semi-anonymously. I came to these comments to see if anyone felt the same.

> We probably disagree on this, but I don’t believe that there’s a basis for an assumption of privacy here

In my view you crossed the line when you included his gender, his current role and employer, and two former employers.

by holden_nelson

1/1/2026 at 11:29:44 PM

If you have a field engineering org that can move these players off of VMWare into Oxide (the software and monitoring, etc.), you could be looking at easy picking of VMWare customers.

by orochimaaru

1/2/2026 at 12:10:40 AM

you act like he violated some high moral commandment by badmouthing a customer. Wasn’t Reuters a sun customer you badmouthed? Wasn’t oracle a sun customer?

Wasn’t this guy you are badmouthing, asking you questions about Oxide tech, also arguably a customer, looked at more soberly?

I just don’t get the high horse. You’re going to defend llnl and Sandia and the nnsa no matter what, since they’re customers? Not badmouthing a customer is the eleventh commandment? It’s something folksy and nice scott McNealy said. It starts losing its charm when you bash people over the head with it in public humiliation rituals like you’re in the red guard or Khmer Rouge.

by eduction

1/2/2026 at 12:46:21 AM

Well, this wasn't badmouthing a customer -- it was showing contempt for customers, full stop. As for the accusations of hypocrisy: the example you picked (a deep cut!) was a Sun customer who insisted that we disable DTrace for their application so their customers (who were also Sun customers!) wouldn't be able to instrument the software that they had paid for. So ironically, I was in fact operating in defense of their customers. (I have generally told that story with the ISV anonymized -- but you clearly found an example where I named them.)

Broadcom is definitely not an Oxide customer -- and the (misguided) questions that were being asked were not about them becoming an Oxide customer.

Finally: isn't it a little hard to argue that I'm public humiliating someone who I am not naming?

by bcantrill

1/2/2026 at 5:08:20 AM

We are back to where we started. When I said in my first message that you basically outed this person, you said it didn’t matter as the tone of the (hitherto private) exchange gave them away anyway. Now you move the goalposts back to the original position and claim you kept them anonymous.

by eduction

1/1/2026 at 11:18:12 PM

That's a tricky one for public writing discretion. The Sun and Broadcom connections add to the point. Something a person with that background said was surprising. And the exact wording in one of the quotes was relevant.

I don't know whether I would've identified the person. As a principal-ish engineer and early startup person, who interacts with teams and all up and down the org charts of companies, it's important that people trust me. One part of that is to show discretion when entrusted with information. It's nuanced.

I have some WTF quotes and situations from recent interviews that I've decided not to share. The most recent one I did share was relatively mild, and I decided to paraphrase what the out-of-line person said, and be reasonably confident the person couldn't be identified. The incubator mentioned is harder to obscure, and is relevant to some people, so I tried to find a reasonable balance, but they should know who they are and be able to take some criticism, so I didn't worry much about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415495

by neilv

1/1/2026 at 5:18:25 PM

I dunno, a few hundred folks?

by thundergolfer

1/1/2026 at 9:28:57 PM

I would be shocked if the number of former Sun people who then worked at VMware and now are in senior engineering management at Broadcom was as high as five.

by margalabargala

1/1/2026 at 2:38:02 PM

I like the sentiment, I really do, but enshittification is a civilization-wide problem. It’s not solved by asking corporations to be nicer.

by Herring

1/1/2026 at 10:54:22 PM

Enshittification is recognizing the symptom and not the disease. If the market functioned I could just not do business with these companies or buy their products. Since many sectors of the US economy are nearly fully monopolized I don't have this choice. So the "enshittification" continues.

by themafia

1/1/2026 at 3:52:54 PM

Nice

by adeeb39

1/2/2026 at 1:45:28 AM

As someone who was at Oracle pre & post Sun acquisition, in sales of all roles (with a decade tenure there) … and then later at VMWare - Bryan lives in his own Reality Distortion and it’s quite unfortunate.

Engineering wise, brilliant.

But very much out of touch with reality.

by throwaway010126

1/2/2026 at 1:54:09 AM

You're not conveying much information here. What is he doing wrong?

by wmf