That would be Sun, right?  Particularly Scott McNealy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft</a> (not needed SGI&#x27;s special sauces, almost all my direct experience here is with Sun and DEC).<p>In addition, the two biggest and interlocked problems with them that I know of are their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an off-CPU chip cache design, required customers to sign NDAs before they would try to fix it, and then blamed the customers and the supplier of the SRAM chips for their non-fault tolerant design.  Instead of, you know, the IBM ethos of fixing the customer&#x27;s problem.<p>Related, in terms of zapping the other channels of sales that might have saved them, was a total internal sales focus on enterprise sales.  If you weren&#x27;t making enterprise sized purchases, several million dollars worth, you were sent to a 3rd party like a VAR, but they typically wouldn&#x27;t give you the time of day, they certainly were difficult to deal with when I worked with companies that bought one or two Sun workstations.  Adding a web site that allowed direct purchases mostly added salt to the wound.<p>What this meant was that startups that needed more Sun kit than they could charge to a credit card on that web site were forced to go with Dell, who&#x27;s machines weren&#x27;t as good, but had the strange property of being willing and able to sell them (HP&#x27;s sales operation was too screwed up at the time to be a big player here).  So a bunch of companies learned how to make do with Dell servers, and the successful ones never looked at Sun when they got big enough.  So they missed out on the big post dot.com sales.<p>A final straw when they started struggling was reducing the quality of their systems, e.g. saving one chip on a motherboard by using a chipset Marvel controller instead of the well tested and trusted Intel one.  And I read that Joylent stopped buying Sun hardware when they started silently changing the lights out hardware they were shipping in their systems (IPMI or the like).