Sun ultimately suffered the same fate of all of the Unix workstation companies. By selling only expensive "Serious Business" hardware to corporations they were

Sun ultimately suffered the same fate of all of the Unix workstation companies. By selling only expensive "Serious Business" hardware to corporations they were able to keep the per-unit margins high, but were completely crushed by commodity PCs in volume and ultimately total profit. Ultimately those huge commodity sales volumes were turned into big R&D budgets that allowed them to produce faster and more efficient hardware than the big workstations providers. And then the one advantage they had: the OS, was undercut by BSD and Linux. So a company has the option of spending 5 or 6 figures on a big Unix box with a 4 figure yearly support contract and pain in the ass license management, or they could spend a low 4 figures on a PC running Linux that is just as good or better in all the ways that matter and doesn't have annoying salesguys to deal with or recurring costs.