I worked at Sun labs and used a Sun Ray daily for a whole summer. It worked...OK. Definitely not "Incredibly well". We had a network of a few hundred Sun Rays and two E10Ks backing it. More than a million for the servers and $1000k a piece for the Sun Rays was not cheap. Basically any $1000 laptop was more powerful, without the need for a crazy powerful Sun server. The experience of taking out my ID card, walking down the hall to another cubicle and popping it in and getting my session was magical. But I did that less than once a week, so I don't think it was overall worth it. The Sun Rays also had a pretty crappy LCD, about 1-2 years behind the SoTA.
It was a cool idea. It will keep coming back again and again. But at Sun's price points around the early 2000s, it was a loser, and I actually agree with the market in this instance. Sun Ray was a flop.
The "two E10Ks" part is the important part there, as you need a very powerful server to support SunRay users running Solaris. At my university there was something like 200 SunRays supported by cluster of T2000s (7 nodes IIRC), it was fine for CDE, Firefox and few dtterms, completely unusable with Gnome (it took Gnome like 10 minutes to even start).
On the other hand I have heard of some success stories about using SunRays as RDP clients, which is actually supported configuration (you still need a Solaris box that manages the sunrays and translates RDP to ALP).
"It will keep coming back again and again."
It lived on in the world of Windows Terminal Services and things like Citrix - maybe still does in some places.
Citrix is still everywhere you need a client that can do things a web browser can’t—like run ancient VB4 software or talk to device hardware—deployed at scale.
Citrix was bought out by PE for $16.5B a few years ago, under the (sadly correct) assumption they hadn’t been charging their customers enough money for this essential tech.
It lives on in the world of LLMs in a way.
Stadia? GeForce Now? Xbox Cloud Gaming? :-)
GeForce is pretty successful. But only because Nvidia can sell itself GPUs at cost and reuse old data center hardware to get lower prices than anyone else.
If you're not cheaper than buying a PC or console you can't win. No one wants to pay more for the privilege of input lag and compressed video, or getting in trouble with their ISP if they have a strict data cap.
$1000k ?
Chromebooks…