I see irony here, in that I'm old enough to remember when Sun was killing because everyone needed high end server hardware to get on the web and so Sun could charge a good premium, and Apple was getting killed because they were trying to sell a premium product into a market that had been commoditized by the PC.
Interesting how things change. I'm not sure what the equivalent of the "Apple strategy" would be for re-establishing a premium brand in the server space.
I was around during the dot-com bust, and this little piece of revisionist lore always irks me. Something called "Linux" existed in 1998-1999, but it is not the "Linux" you know today, and when stacked up against Solaris running on Sun hardware, it didn't really work. People wanted to run their entire back-end on a single system, and that single system pretty much had to be a Sun E10000 running Oracle, because nothing else could scale up as high. The LAMP-stack scale-out style of system-building had not been invented yet.
I agree with you that people liked scaling using a single big machine back then, and Sun had the biggest and best machines (and still does to some extent).
The problem is more that a ton of those people didn't actually need to scale.
I see irony here, in that I'm old enough to remember when Sun was killing because everyone needed high end server hardware to get on the web and so Sun could charge a good premium, and Apple was getting killed because they were trying to sell a premium product into a market that had been commoditized by the PC.
Interesting how things change. I'm not sure what the equivalent of the "Apple strategy" would be for re-establishing a premium brand in the server space.