Comment by schmichael
9 hours ago
Sure, I'm not saying that IBM's switch to services is some brilliant panacea for all proprietary hardware makers, just citing it as one of the market changes at the time that Sun seemed unprepared for.
What's interesting is that the other RISC outfit at the time, little old Acorn in the UK, did manage to adapt their proprietary chip business to the future of compute and now we all use many many ARM processors every day.
So clearly there was still a hardware route available, just again: a huge product/engineering shift.
It didn't hurt that ARM was spun out entirely. The computer side of Acorn was wound up in 1998/9, and then the remnant of that went onto DSL boxes, exiting by getting picked up by Broadcom for £366 million.