Sun failed miserably in embracing Linux and cloud computing (as a service). They hung on to their old business that was getting commoditized rapidly, plus having huge dependencies on Wall St. customers didn't help.
In other words, I have no idea what's going to happen to Sun. But, I like them better as a company under Schwartz than at any time in the past ten of fifteen years.
Why do you think that? All the Solaris (most of Sun's revenue) Sun's former customers actually use is Solaris, not OpenSolaris. No Sun customers I know would go without a support plan if they use Sun's OSS work. Right now they already pay Red Hat for their support plans.
Because Schwartz as much as said so at a conference last year. Maybe I misinterpret the remark, but it was something along the lines of, "I've caught some flak for our Open Source strategy from Wall Street and some of our institutional investors, but I believe that long-term this is the only viable option for Sun." I took this to mean he believes, and that some investors believe, that in the short term, going all Open Source is a net negative for their revenue.
The price was absurd even then. But further, you had to purchase exact blocks of time in advance. And if you bought 12 hours, but then only needed 2, tough cookies.