Joel Spolsky's Strategy Letter V is something that I think is interesting in this Sun conversation

> Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun's two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and WORA. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Without proprietary advantages in hardware or software, you're going to have to take the commodity price, which barely covers the cost of cheap factories in Guadalajara, not your cushy offices in Silicon Valley.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

By keeping Google as one, presumably around search, Google has a shot at avoiding the same fate.

Joel has always seen things from Microsoft's point of view. And we are actually living in the world he mocked: both hardware and software, on the server side, have been largely commoditized.

He didn't mock the world, he mocked Sun's strategy and it played out exactly like he said causing Sun to die off.

One could say Sun read the tea leaves of the industry correctly, they just didn't couldn't shed their history quickly enough to execute on it. Cloud services are the new proprietary and Sun had begun building that shortly before Oracle came knocking.

Sun got its dream come true (and `the network is the computer', too), but it lost as a company.