Aut Larry aut nihil? As James Gosling pointed out just recently, IBM was the second option, not bankruptcy. IBM was thought as worse when it came to laying off people and outsourcing their jobs, but they tend to respect their IP and engineers more -- which is a pretty sad revelation, considering that we're talking about big ol' Inferior But Marketable[1] here.
Actually, I think that properly managing the company and preventing the bankruptcy would be a better third option.
I know, I know... It's easy to say it now, that hindsight is always 20-20, but come on, who outside Sun thought their market strategy was sane? Who really believed they were on the right track? And, as much as I like McNeally (he was really fun), it's as much his fault as Schwartz's that Sun had a problem with "financial reality" (as Gosling so mildly said).
It was painful to watch because we knew how cool technologies they had were, what they could accomplish while, at the same time, knowing it wouldn't last.
