That's b*ll, really. Sun's "party culture", if that's what you'd like to call it, is and was "of its time". As were 1000$-a-head New York night club bashes for

That's b*ll, really. Sun's "party culture", if that's what you'd like to call it, is and was "of its time". As were 1000$-a-head New York night club bashes for a "successful" team at Wall St. pre-Lehman. All great to have had if you happened to have been in the right place at the right time. It was as-common then as free snacks and ping-pong tables are today. We lucky old bastards. I'd rather call the mid-to-late 1990s the "Golden Age" of systems. All on-premises (hence a glut of money going to hardware), more and more business needs for software (and most of it proprietary, with a nice chunk of "professional services" costs on-top to configure & customize). IBM, Oracle, SAP or Microsoft just played that latter game, software/services, with higher stakes and higher wins than Sun, HP/Compaq, Dell etc did for hardware. What killed Sun wasn't their "party culture". It was their arrogance to believe SPARC the top of the world years after cheap&cheerful x86 had proven itself, and their arrogance to give customers the message "we know best". Sun had more than one chance to pivot to-Linux, or off-hardware, or both, and botched it every time. If you fail to read the market, and refuse to sell customers what they ask for, then no matter your past record, your future looks dull.