Just as a note on the factors I looked at: 1) Cash positive operations and cash reserves 2) Healthy services business (customer satisfaction, etc) These ar

Just as a note on the factors I looked at: 1) Cash positive operations and cash reserves 2) Healthy services business (customer satisfaction, etc) These are important because they are a hedge against open source software and upgrade cycles that extend as hardware matures. 3) Lack of vertical integration/insularity 4) Organizational awareness of issues. Sun scored relatively low on these, Oracle depended on how heavily you rated customer satisfaction and customer perceptions, and Microsoft scored high on everything but healthy services businesses, but there they were growing and trying lots of things.