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.