A look back at Sun's rise and fall

摘要

Oracles surprising $7.4 billion deal to purchase Sun last week gives Larry Ellison and crew a big stake in the hardware market as well as control over Java and other well-known open source technologies. But it also spells the end of an independent Sun, one of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies.rnHow did it all come to this for the 27-year-old Sun, regarded as one of the industry's great innovators? The dot-com crash at the start of this decade is frequently cited as the beginning of the end for Sun, and for good reason. But acquisition missteps and a failure to monetize key products such as Java also hastened Sun's descent.