It made sense at the time. It was too big for Sun to handle alone (well, with Fujitsu, IIRC). Sun had a lot of things on their plate at the time. Sadly, chip ar

It made sense at the time. It was too big for Sun to handle alone (well, with Fujitsu, IIRC). Sun had a lot of things on their plate at the time. Sadly, chip architecture was something they could drop without much loss. Also remember, this was the era when Apple needed to switch from the PPC to Intel too. There was a major shift in the server market from older architectures (Sparc, Power, Alpha) where everyone was standardizing on x86. It’s only been recently where ARM has been performance competitive. Only then could the power savings from ARM be a killer feature from a $/unit work point of view. And ARM gets to leverage many different users/fabs for chips. It’s a very different ecosystem than having a single company drive an entire architecture, regardless of how great the tech was. (And support software, porting, etc.)