Yeah, I remember that change. I had a couple of Sun SPARC boxes at a clients office, and had an installation of Solaris x86 at my house on a spare box, just so

Yeah, I remember that change. I had a couple of Sun SPARC boxes at a clients office, and had an installation of Solaris x86 at my house on a spare box, just so I could stay familiar with the system and try things in a non-production environment. It was an unpleasant surprise when they pulled the free x86 version. But, I doubt it was catastrophic for Sun; I also doubt bandwidth was a major concern for them, though I'm not confident about why they pulled the x86 free version. My recollection of events and post-mortems from people within Sun about that decision and other decisions surrounding x86 Solaris was that there was a battle going on within Sun about what the future of Sun looked like (which happens when a ship is sinking as Sun was). There were those who wanted to double down on hardware, because it had always been their bread-and-butter and was still their primary profit source. Putting Solaris on x86, as with putting Mac OS on Mac clones, was cannibalizing their own hardware sales. Dell could push out high quality x86 servers for half the price of Sun, and if someone could put Solaris x86 on it, there wasn't much reason for companies to spend the extra money for a Sun box (so the thinking went for the folks who were in the "bet on hardware" camp at Sun). The other camp wanted to tackle Linux on its on turf, and pushed for x86 support, free, and eventually open source. The path to profits among that camp were a little less clear than the champions of hardware, but they did have some successes eventually in getting Solaris open sourced (but too late, as we all now know). I dunno. By the time Solaris was Open Source, Linux was a better system for most users, even pretty big users. And, then there was no entry point for Sun into any company that had left behind Solaris on SPARC for Linux on x86. They had no ties to SPARC, anymore, and no ties to Solaris. So, nothing left to leverage for service revenue or anything else. The same battle played out at several other UNIX workstation vendors. Sun was just the last one standing. SGI went whole-hog for Windows NT, trying to keep their hardware business afloat (and failed, going through a couple of acquisitions after the fact, and now they're what was formerly Rackable). I don't know what Sun could have done to survive fighting a war on two fronts, with Windows on the enterprise desktop/workstation side, and Linux on the server side. They made it longer than most of their competitors in the space, so maybe they made the right decisions but the innovator's dilemma just didn't leave them a lot of options short of shrinking the company and changing its focus and soul massively.