Well, platforms like Solaris/Sparc are never just dumped. No matter who ended up with it would be milking it all the way down, making it that much more expensiv

Well, platforms like Solaris/Sparc are never just dumped. No matter who ended up with it would be milking it all the way down, making it that much more expensive & obscure every year, until the users finally say uncle. Generally that's when the customer wants a new CRM or something and gets two birds with one stone. That's why it would have been disastrous for Oracle if IBM got them. Everytime a Sun customer ordered a new stick of RAM, the IBM software sales team would have been circling around. (Note: I'm sure there's some niches where Sun hardware is very strong, but those are only going to get narrower over time.)