Sun was very much enterprise, nice reliability and support but commodity hardware completely blew them away for most purposes. They were still selling $10k workstations when a cheap consumer PC running Linux would run laps around it.

Linux didn't even dent it in my universe back then. Between 1996 and 1999 we switched our internal systems from Solaris to NT. Even our Oracle on HP/UX estate got eaten by SQL Server 7.

Our 1999 capex and opex was 25% of what it was in 1996 and we delivered more benefits to our users.

It was nigh impossible to find on their website a place where you could pay them to sell you things, it was sad but not surprising that they were going under.