Yes, thanks for that, it stirred my recollection as I actually bumped into Jon Swartz by accident just in that era.

I don't think it was money, so much as the established culture at Sun (i.e. James Gosling: "Sun is not so much a company but a debating society). A more aggressive CEO/leadership/culture would have maybe raised the money to take on Google, or to take another tact.

So while you are right - and thanks for the reference - the issue here is what Sun was about, vs. what Oracle is about.

Whatever Sun was "about", sadly, it didn't work, and damaged some excellent technologies, like Java and Solaris, that Sun couldn't invest a lot of resources into because it no longer had them. Oracle managed to save one of them and make it thrive. Sun, as a big, impactful company, was a product of the dot-com bubble. It certainly made more lasting contributions than other bubble-era companies, but its strategy couldn't survive the crash. Maybe great ideas can be born in companies like Sun but need companies like Oracle to sustain.

I've been saying for years that Pivotal Labs is a debating club that produces code as a by-product. But now I'm wondering if I read the Gosling quip and then forgot I had.