I didn't work at Sun, and I have no inside knowledge. But I lived through it; 1) Sun made expensive gear. Nice stuff to be sure, but too expensive for home use

I didn't work at Sun, and I have no inside knowledge. But I lived through it; 1) Sun made expensive gear. Nice stuff to be sure, but too expensive for home use. Target market was therefore "business". 2) Intel improved quickly. So every couple years Intel machines basically doubled in performance. When your hook is "fastest" you need to iterate very fast to stay ahead. 3) every time Intel got faster, some part of the market got lost. Which means convincing existing customers their hardware is obsolete and time to buy again. Folk are being sold really expensive gear and then told its obsolete barely a few years later. 4) dot com bust floods the market with cheap everything, including cheap Sun hardware. 5) network effects (software availability, using the same computer at work, at home, at school, experience at prior wotkplaces) all work against Sun. (In another thread I see an ex-Sun person referring to windoze- if all else fails, try shaming the client into making "better choices".) Java (write once, run anywhere) was a play to improve software availability, but folks selling Java software weren't really interested in supporting niche platforms (so yeah, it probably runs on Sun, but we don't have one so we don't support that). Plus Java became "write once, debug everywhere". In short Sun lost because Wintel was everywhere, and Sun was too expensive, and ultimately had no edge. In a market with network effects there are winners and everyone else fails.