In hindsight, I wonder if there was a point where Sun could've acquired Oracle instead of letting vice versa happen financially speaking.<p>Could've Sun saved their money and thought about 1 major acquisition instead of many? Did Larry Ellison have in the back of his mind, "one day I want to acquire Sun" as he played golf with McNealy?<p>As a company in a declining market margin-wise, I'd want to be capitalizing on previous gains by moving into a growing market - especially with regards to complimentary products: it's all about maintaining dominance, the problem was that Sun let Oracle become more dominant than it: not that they were ever competitors, but they should never have been such friends.<p>Has commodity hardware with its lower profit margins and prices displaced proprietary hardware to a greater degree than open-source software has displaced closed-source software? If so, moving into software would've been the right move for Sun.<p>Oracle's slogan is now: "Software. Hardware. Complete."<p>Could've been Sun's had they moved more aggressively into Databases and Apps? But they didn't because they didn't want to be a total solution provider, the idea was to leave that to IBM and instead specialize and promote a best-of-breed model to customers and foster an ecosystem around their platform. Good for a while until the other big player in the eco-system, Oracle, becomes bigger.<p>ScottMcNealy.com is even owned by Oracle now.<p>Sun: well and truly pwned.