They got absorbed by Oracle.

It would be hard to argue that Sun has not disappeared.

Consumed by a black hole of legal wrangling and excessive billing.

One of the most innovative companies absorbed by the company whose only innovation is finding new legal loopholes to screw more money out of their customers. Some fates are worse than disappearance.

At least they began iterating more quickly on Java, I remember as years went by and Sun's OOP purists were still saying that they were considering anonymous functions but just couldn't decide on the syntax.

That's not entirely fair to Oracle. Their original database had a big impact. It was only later that their business model switched to screwing their own customers as hard as possible.

General Magic [1] is also a contender.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic

General Magic never really accomplished anything. Sun did. GM was more famous for people who worked there than anything else. Did they work on things early? Yeah, so did Ted Nelson. But did they ship product real people used? Not really. I don't think anyone outside Silicon Valley remembers them.

"Magic Link PIC-2000 was released in 1996." [1], 11 years before the iPhone. Sure, they didn't have the success of Sun, some could say that would make General Magic's case sadder: wasted potential hurts more than the inability to follow the future.

I have never been in Silicon Valley and I remember General Magic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Link

It wasn't marketing. Their products were just bad. Late model SPARC devices were trying to compete with Intel Coppermines that were literally twice as fast and three times cheaper. There was a brief moment where it looked like a pivot to software (via Java) might save them, but Microsoft killed that. Then very late they tried moving to Intel hardware themselves, but by then Linux had reached feature parity and passed Solaris in performance.

The final knife was the cloud. AWS was a huge paradigm shift for how one provisions hardware to Unixy software, and Amazon was a Linux shop and Solaris had nowhere to fit.

IIRC, it wasn't the cloud per se that did them in, it was the 2008 financial crisis.

Ironically, Sun had Utility Computing for a buck a CPU hour way before anybody grasped the concept in the mid-2000s. When Oracle took over then they immediately killed this (became known as Sun Cloud) and had to start way late with Oracle Cloud. If Sun had kept going then they could have been where AWS eventually ended up. Oh well.