> Sun Microsystems had immense revenue and clout in the server and enterprise space because of the dotcom boom, so much so that their advertising declared "We're the dot in dotcom."

Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware.

> With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed.

Sun was a hardware company that did everything it could to commoditize software. That strategy works extremely well for hardware companies -- Intel successfully did the same thing for many years -- as long as their hardware is competitive.

They were perfectly content to sell SPARC hardware with Linux on it. But to do that they need to sell enough of it to keep up the R&D, i.e. they needed to ship desktop chips in similar quantities to Intel instead of only servers.

Original Sun hardware was rugged, operating mounted in truck beds running across corrugated roads rugged, optional full Faraday shielding for box, cables, and monitors tough. Really positive "never going to let you go" slotting of expansion cards into motherboard that resisted vibration issues. Fans that could go in a building HVAC.

That came at a cost and the market size of people that really really wanted / needed that field toughness was considerably smaller than the general office usage market.