I have to agree. When you have the top job, it's all your fault.

It's his fault that Sun was vulnerable, that it's market share eroded, that its product line was not competitive and so on. Sun was indeed a thing of beauty. Its fate is a sad thing and the fact that things like these happen diminish us all.

I dunno.

I once met some SunSpot developers at a conference (perhaps it was a Maker Faire?) and I asked when the Spots would be for sale. One of the developers explained that they had a warehousefull, but had a lot of problems getting organizational agreement on how to sell the units (they aren't servers, etc.) They eventually found they could sell them the way the company sold t-shirts. $500 t-shirts, anyway.

tl;dr: company can't sell things even when they want to.

From my perspective, the issue was with execution, not strategic values. Recall the SmugMug guys struggle to use Sun hardware. Not only could they not get someone from sales to return their call, but they had a heck of a time even getting the devices set-up in their datacenter.

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/16/sun-honeymoon-update...

How many things must have gone wrong so that a config UI requiring a non-obvious, redundant magic string could have gotten out the door?

Edit: The "jumped the shark" moment was when, at JavaOne, Sun claimed it would build the world's largest app store by installing nagware along with the JVM.