Too true
Not long ago, Sun was celebrated as one of the Four Horsemen of the Internet. Companies looking to make their mark on the Web knew exactly which vendors to seek out: Cisco for routers, EMC for storage equipment, Oracle for database software, and Sun for servers - those centralized computers that pump out every page on the Web and every piece of email. And while Cisco, Oracle, and EMC have struggled through the downturn, none of the three has suffered nearly as much as Sun. Like all great rise and fall stories, Sun's saga is one replete with hubris, missed opportunities, and outright mistakes. But the story reduces down to this: McNealy spent the second half of the 1990s monomaniacally obsessed with everything having to do with Microsoft, from its monopoly-like practices to the general unreliability of the Windows operating system. Meanwhile, stalwarts like Hewlett-Packard and IBM began selling servers on par with Sun's most powerful and expensive machines. Dell and Intel, propelled by Linux, started cutting into Sun's core business at the low end. By the time Sun woke up to this new reality, the smart-guy pundits were asking if the company would be the first big casualty of Linux.
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