As far as I could tell perhaps the #1 Sun died was fantastically inept management, most especially in sales:
Sun just wouldn't talk to you directly if you weren't buying mainframe levels ($$$) of hardware. At some point they established a site where you could punch in your credit card, but if you needed more you were at the mercy of their "VARs" and resellers, who in far too many cases also wouldn't give you the time of day (note this was CPU agnostic, it was true for their x86 hardware according to the stories below and for SPARC hardware in my personal experience).
A little quality time with a search engine will find stories from all sorts of startups upset that they were forced to buy Dell since Dell actually wanted to sell stuff to them in any quantity (at the same time HP's sales function was also messed up in different ways).
So Sun missed out on all the startups that became really big; by the time these companies were buying in mainframe quantities Sun was just a bad memory.
One thing that I noticed happening later was companies dropping Sun because their hardware kept changing. In one case they dropped a great discrete Intel Ethernet chip in favor of the ones on the nVidia chipset, in another, they kept changing the management interface. (A bit like one of the things that hurt Compaq, you could buy many copies of the same model, yet adjacent serial numbers might have totally different motherboards.)
It's no accident that Sun's sales organization seems to be where Oracle is making the biggest quickest changes (hiring thousands of salesmen as I recall).
ADDED THOUGHT: I don't think the thesis in the linked article flies. As I see it, it posits that if Sun had done a (much) better job with open source, the business gained from that could have covered for their failures elsewhere.
Better, I say, to have fixed both sets of failures.
What you're describing is a classic case of channel conflict. The same problem largely killed off several CAD software vendors back in the day. It was also one of the key reasons why Novell's NetWare business failed after being highly profitable for years.
Isn't this more like "channel incompetence" than channel conflict? My understanding of channel conflict is that it happens when manufacturers disintermediate their channel partners by selling directly to customers (which is exactly what it seems Oracle will be doing now).
What Sun did was to fail to police their channel partners and confirm that they would actually sell intermediate quantities of equipment; I know that throughout the '90s it was extremely difficult for me to buy single Sun SPARC systems (workstations and servers), and as noted in my original message too many startups found it impossible to buy six figures worth of systems.
I assume their partners understood that Sun handled the really big purchases (maybe they got a piece of the action???) and that the only conflict was when Sun set up their web storefront for the small purchases a customer could put on a credit card.
Sun just wouldn't talk to you directly if you weren't buying mainframe levels ($$$) of hardware. At some point they established a site where you could punch in your credit card, but if you needed more you were at the mercy of their "VARs" and resellers, who in far too many cases also wouldn't give you the time of day (note this was CPU agnostic, it was true for their x86 hardware according to the stories below and for SPARC hardware in my personal experience).
A little quality time with a search engine will find stories from all sorts of startups upset that they were forced to buy Dell since Dell actually wanted to sell stuff to them in any quantity (at the same time HP's sales function was also messed up in different ways).
So Sun missed out on all the startups that became really big; by the time these companies were buying in mainframe quantities Sun was just a bad memory.
One thing that I noticed happening later was companies dropping Sun because their hardware kept changing. In one case they dropped a great discrete Intel Ethernet chip in favor of the ones on the nVidia chipset, in another, they kept changing the management interface. (A bit like one of the things that hurt Compaq, you could buy many copies of the same model, yet adjacent serial numbers might have totally different motherboards.)
It's no accident that Sun's sales organization seems to be where Oracle is making the biggest quickest changes (hiring thousands of salesmen as I recall).
ADDED THOUGHT: I don't think the thesis in the linked article flies. As I see it, it posits that if Sun had done a (much) better job with open source, the business gained from that could have covered for their failures elsewhere.
Better, I say, to have fixed both sets of failures.