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Building an AD-compatible service is not that easy, and it was not easy circa 2006, because there was a lot to reverse engineer. Sure, Sun had access to its own directory service (Sun DS), MIT Kerberos, BIND, OpenLDAP, NSS, and Samba, so it had a lot of the pieces, but there was a lot of work to be done putting everything together.

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The issue was not reverse engineering Active Directory to make a compatible system, it was that they didn't really capitalize in that direction. Sun has all the necessary pieces to make a compelling option at the time.

Microsoft really only wiped competition in the area when 2000 landed with Active Directory instead of the clunky previous NT Domain system.

Yes. Over-generalizing a bit -perhaps-, the issue was that any Sun division that was a profit center tended to rest on its laurels instead of innovating and disrupting. Solaris was a cost center, so Solaris engineering innovated. The DS folks were a profit center.

For sure. But Sun had great engineers, and it was a feature that I'd argue was visibly existential at the time.

Sun's engineering culture -and engineers- was the only reason it survived as long as it did. It and they were amazing.

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