That might have worked IF:<p>Startups could have bought them.  It was very hard to buy Sun hardware in the quantities between what you could put on a credit card and the equivalent of a mainframe installation.  A lot of people who wanted to buy Sun ended up buying Dell servers and that deprived Sun of the sales they would have made for the companies that were big hits.<p>They had kept their hardware configurations consistent.  A number of big customers dropped them because they kept changing things like the management interface, Ethernet chip (Intel to nVidia chipset), etc.  Sometimes their SATA device driver support was less than stellar (I saw this as someone who <i>wanted</i> to run Solaris in the 2007-8 period on a Tyan motherboard that Sun OEMed) and I have to wonder about other device drivers (Sun wasn't all that good at fixing serious bugs).<p>Unconnected, but devastating: they burned a <i>tremendous</i> amount of credibility in enterprise server space when they had a flaky cache problem and required their customers to sign an NDA before they would get service ... and then tended to blame the customer for server room environment problems.  A different attitude was needed if they wanted sustained success in this place, which for them developed very quickly after they bought that SMP Sparc system from SGI.<p>One bottom line is just too many failures to execute.