[dfrage]

There are a few details Gosling left out: Sun trusted those chips enough to omit parity or ECC that would have smoked out the problem early, Sun reversed whatever growing trust it had been earning in enterprise space by blaming the customer and for some time making them sign NDAs to work on the problem, and Sun had engineered their sales so that they only did direct for enterprise sized purchases.

They had really good x86 hardware at a time when the post-dot.com crash wave of companies was getting started, but the sales channels were what you could charge on a credit card on their site, and VARs and the like which usually wouldn't sell to startups. Dell got a great deal of that business because they actually wanted to sell, and by the time these companies' hardware fleets got big enough for enterprise sized orders they'd long mastered how to run Dell or whatever systems to provide a reliable service.