Yet Apple survives and thrives. Sun wasn't really a hardware company or a software company. That was the problem, it seemed they really didn't know what they wanted to be, so they tried to be everything and failed.
Apple counterpoint is right on the "money". Apple was having quite a lot of problems before wunderkind returned.
This is obviously hindsight, but imagine:
It is early 90s, you are the company that goes by the motto "the network is the computer", and you have this incredibly hot tech called Java that can run on any tier. A bit later and your JME is on billions of mobile devices all over the world.
A Steve Jobs type of leader would have been able to leverage that amazing potential. And the transformation would have been as decisive as Apple's.
Sun was never able to turn JME into a viable application platform. The standard library was too limited and didn't allow much access to interesting mobile device peripherals (GPS, camera, microphone, motion sensor, etc). So to write any kind of significant application required separate versions for each cell phone model and carrier using their proprietary API extensions, security system, and provisioning model. This fragmentation prevented the emergence of a developer ecosystem.
JME had a lot of potential at the beginning but Sun just couldn't execute or get the device vendors and cellular providers to cooperate on common standards that would have benefited them all. The iPhone and Blackberry have now made JME largely irrelevant.
Yes, Sun's inability to execute in consumer markets appears in the failure of applets against flash. And it would also prevent them from creating something like an iPhone.
It seems that just about all current success stories in computing are in consumer markets: search, social websites, smartphones.
It's true that Oracle is doing well and they aren't in consumer markets - but their market is not showing rapid growth; on the contrary, they are actively consolidating it.
And I guess the business lesson here is to learn to spot dissonance in your business strategy.
Sun engaged the consumer market with propaganda. That was the extent of their engagement. (Remember all those Sun ads during the dotcom bubble?)
But in reality, Sun was in reality only engaging geeks. Sun has never failed as a company catering to geeks.
Somebody in that company should have noted that their desire (Sun for the masses) and their actions (Sun for techies) were not congruent.
Proof is in the fact that in the case where the general public has little input - the backend -- Sun was (and remains) spectacularly successful. The mistakes made here are far less specific to Sun, and very much related to the dissonance between being in business to make money and being enlightened hippies who are making substantial contributions to the industry, for free.
