[sn1de]

They were already doomed at that point. I was involved in several major purchase decisions during that period and Sun were totally out of touch. If they were quoting hardware that had an x86 equivalent, then they were overpriced. If it was something that didn't have an x86 equivalent, like they had for a while with 64 bit, the prices were atrocious. Then Lintel moved to 64 bit and it was all over. The price/performance equation was broken, but Sun, for whatever reason, kept on like nothing had happened. I, and I'm sure many others, tried to show them that they were uncompetitive, but you were dealing with reps working from a price sheet and citing the same old mantra that Sun was inherently superior. For years when I would tell peers that the Sun equipment was just throwing away money they wouldn't believe me because they hadn't done the benchmarking. Really, if people did proper benchmarking and didn't just 'buy what they know' without questioning, it all would have unwound even more quickly. They certainly had some good tech, and were not wrong about the advantages of containerization, which came full circle with linux containerization and docker, but IBM mainframes had similar virtualization capabilities in place long before Solaris zones, so it wasn't something that was a game changer. Ironically, it worked against them because even though they were right, it was seen by some as Sun touting their way of doing it because they didn't have a viable solution for the prevailing VM direction of hardware virtualization. Basically, they began by offering the best price/performance and innovation, but then died trying to be a 'premium provider' without the goods to back it up, and market forces then do what market forces do.

[blantonl]

Sun's sales guys were killing it right up until their last breath. I can clearly remember thinking to myself "why does this Sun/Solaris node cost $32k when this equivalent Intel costs $10K?" One day it was the in-thing, the next pooof Solaris was GONE.

[jasoneckert]

I agree that they were doomed by that point as well primarily due to Linux on faster and cheaper x86 hardware. My UltraSPARC-III-based Blade 1500 that was an incredibly overpriced workstation that only ran Solaris well, and wasn't on par with the performance of x86 at the time.

However, I do remember buying an Opteron-based Ultra 20 because it was cheaper from Sun than anyone else and had 100% Linux support, which everyone seemed to be migrating to from Solaris. By that time, I'm sure there was no clear market direction for Sun software- or hardware-wise, and everything was too little too late.