I was at Sun when SPARC was invented. And I think Sun killed it.
Every time someone started trying to take advantage of the "open" nature of SPARC, Sun would out compete them, fairly or not. It was a pretty open secret that Sun had hitched its wagon to the "best" processor for running Unix servers. As I told the leadership after I left that Sun was becoming DEC. They were retreating to the enterprise data center, nobody was buying workstations any more, and Solaris was not getting any more open. I suggested they build servers with the Opteron too :-).
Every time someone started trying to take advantage of the "open" nature of SPARC, Sun would out compete them, fairly or not. It was a pretty open secret that Sun had hitched its wagon to the "best" processor for running Unix servers. As I told the leadership after I left that Sun was becoming DEC. They were retreating to the enterprise data center, nobody was buying workstations any more, and Solaris was not getting any more open. I suggested they build servers with the Opteron too :-).