Sure, I'm not saying that IBM's switch to services is some brilliant panacea for all proprietary hardware makers, just citing it as one of the market changes at the time that Sun seemed unprepared for.

What's interesting is that the other RISC outfit at the time, little old Acorn in the UK, did manage to adapt their proprietary chip business to the future of compute and now we all use many many ARM processors every day.

So clearly there was still a hardware route available, just again: a huge product/engineering shift.