I was working in a UK financial blue chip (FTSE 100/high street bank) from 1999 to 2008 where I got my main Sun exposure.

I loved the Sun kit and Solaris. Touched everything from Sparc workstations to E10K/E15K. It felt like home!

A random selection of areas where they went wrong from my viewpoint as a junior to senior unix admin at the time..

Biggest of all - IBM did a complete number on them in my workplace. Hugely aggressive presence. We had a regular Sun PS person onsite. IBM dropped a whole bunch of people in. Sales, pre sales tech, anything we wanted. Completely undercut Sun and leveraged mainframe deals to push their p5 kit. Before we knew it there was a 'unix consolidation project' and I found myself grumpily using a HMC and bloody AIX. Millions in lost revenue. Went from a tiny IBM presence in a lovely multicultural Unix estate (HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, even Dynix) to bland banks of Power racks in the datacentres. A complete capitulation.

That whole "attributing mysterious system crashes and memory corruption in SPARC Enterprise servers to stray cosmic rays" thing. They handled this really badly. I got called out so often for this. An open goal for IBM. Sun was so expensive and yet we'd be having to report

They should have made more of an effort with their estate management software or made stuff free to use. They had such good ideas around patching etc but everything seemed to cost money. Our Sun estate was a real mess of patch levels. Our poor PS guy would be sent along and try to get jumpstart implemented but would say it'll cost ££££. IBM ate their lunch (even if their stuff wasn't as good, or ever really implemented properly in our shop). They had Dtrace and it was never used in our estate despite being free.

They were unfortunately too early on a bunch of things. Such good ideas around open source and things like technical blogs! But the culture was different, certainly in corporate UK at the time (I started an internal blog in the Unix team and people thought I was insane). They should have given away compilers and stuff. Everything seemed to cost money.

They could have aggressively supported Linux as something to differentiate them from IBM. The battles I had trying to get Linux in the door for anything, but when it did arrive it was running on Power. Their whole Solaris x86 thing was just confusing.

ZFS seemed to be fumbled. We spent a fortune on Veritas products. I did love Veritas filesystem and their clustering stuff. Sun could have gone for that market and somehow it never happened.