Sun had the perfect opportunity with Utility Computing around the mid-2000s but when cloud took off we had Oracle buying SUNW. They killed Sun Cloud which had the opportunity to be big, vast, and powered by JAVA hardware.
Sun Microsystems was a company like no other. The last of a dying breed of "family" technology companies.
I was at the MySQL conference when it was announced that Oracle was buying Sun. It just took all the life out of the conference. All the Sun folks were super pissed off. Truly the end of an era.
I was there too. It certainly felt "timed" to maximize the sense of deflation for people working on MySQL. Perhaps it was just coincidence. IIRC Larry Ellison said that the crown jewel in the deal was actually Java.
I remember that time. It felt like Sun was on death's doorstep since the dot-com crash. On the hardware side, the market was flooded with used Sun hardware. On the software side, Linux was "good enough" for most workloads.
Sun Microsystems was a company like no other. The last of a dying breed of "family" technology companies.