Sun responded to the threat with characteristic pluck: disparaging Microsoft and looking to counter it with technologies like Java and OpenOffice. While those efforts did succeed in taking Microsoft down a notch, they did not do much for Sun, Enderle said.

But as the 1990s boom revved up to a spectacular collapse at the turn of the millennium, the combative attitude that helped Sun face down bigger rivals blinded it to a changing business environment, allowing competitors to build leads in such areas as Web services standardization and push non-Sun technologies like Intel chips and the Windows OS.'

Ironically, Sun's previous flag-waving for Solaris and SPARC while momentum mounted for Intel and Linux may have blinded Sun to the need for reform within its own product line and placed the company in the position of appearing as a proprietary systems vendor -- a cruel fate for a company that had always prided itself on being open and based on industry standards.

Co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim said that the rise of Intel and Sun's not having an x86 system contributed to his decision to leave the company in 1995.

"I was getting worried that the cost performance of those systems was catching up with the SPARC architecture," said Bechtolsheim, who has since returned to Sun as chief architect of industry standard products.