As a former Sun guy, I can say it's because extracting value wasn't something we were very good at or really gave much weight. From Grid to Java to Solaris 10 Zones and ZFS, Jini, RFID we mostly just made cool stuff and then... went and made other cool stuff.
To be honest - I think it's a timing thing - virtualization wasn't popular initially but VMWare did a great marketing job. Then any hyper-visor became acceptable. Now - VPS-style containers are becoming acceptable. IE: Docker.
Being too early can kill you. If you think your idea is awesome but too early, my advice is to keep trying for as long as it takes. Docker was not my first attempt at solving this particular problem :) [1] [2] [3]
We had very little adult supervision.