Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware.
> With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed.
Sun was a hardware company that did everything it could to commoditize software. That strategy works extremely well for hardware companies -- Intel successfully did the same thing for many years -- as long as their hardware is competitive.
They were perfectly content to sell SPARC hardware with Linux on it. But to do that they need to sell enough of it to keep up the R&D, i.e. they needed to ship desktop chips in similar quantities to Intel instead of only servers.
That came at a cost and the market size of people that really really wanted / needed that field toughness was considerably smaller than the general office usage market.
Whereas if not for that, you could do both. Design a solid chip and then put dozens of them in a big iron cabinet for big money but also offer desktops with just one of them for prices that compete with Dell. Except that Dell's customers expect to open their existing Office documents and run their Windows API proprietary software and then won't buy from you.