Wasn’t Sun’s main issue that they were selling extremely expensive hardware and a proprietary OS that were completely overtaken by x86 and Linux?
I remember getting to play with the very expensive hardware they’d handout to startups in the late 90’s and early 00’s. It was good hardware, but it wasn’t so much better than the slightly more buggy and much less costly Linux systems at the time.
Geniuses with tech, but maybe not so good on the business side?
Also a good read: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
It turned out the hunters would rather amputate a live animal’s tail than take a healthy rat, capable of breeding and creating so many more rats—with those valuable tails—out of commission. There were also reports that some Vietnamese were smuggling foreign rats into the city. And then the final straw: Health inspectors discovered, in the countryside on the outskirts of Hanoi, pop-up farming operations dedicated to breeding rats.”
More importantly, I wouldn't trust a word that Larry Ellison says - particularly when the primary purpose of the article was to boost the Oracle share price by explaining that Sun would be additive to that quarters profits. I'm not saying that Scott McNeally or Jonathan Schwartz were great execs - I have no idea - but I think you have to look at the goal of the article.
If they had learned these skills from companies like RH/SUSE/IBM, then Java would have been in much better hands today.
Secondly, with Sun you would never had gotten AOT, because they saw it as something that 3rd party vendors like Oracle and IBM should care about, they were fully into "JIT or bust", and MaximeVM would have followed the same path as SPOTs, instead of turning into GraalVM.