It would have affected their cost base certainly, and probably their entire datacentre strategy. With SPARC kit, you wouldn't build assuming that machines will often fail and simply be swapped out, for example, something that Google is famous for.

> With SPARC kit, you wouldn't build assuming that machines will often fail

In the late 90s SPARCs did fail. Yes, they were more reliable than commodity x86 boxes, but they failed often enough that it was an issue if you had 100 or so, and search engines hit that level very quickly.

Right, but look at what Google do, their boxes are basically disposable. Why invest in dual-redundant-hotswappable-everything boxes when you just throw the entire thing away if any bit of it breaks, 'cos it's cheaper to replace it than to even try to repair it in-place.

> Right, but look at what Google do, their boxes are basically disposable

We're talking matter of degree.

The claim was that building a search engine out of 90s sparcs meant that you didn't have to worry about things dying.

That claim is not true - reasonable search engines of that era required enough machines that the failure rate of 90s sparcs, while better than x86 of the time, was enough to require folks to handle frequent failures.

It's reasonable to argue that the cost/benefit tradeoff of sparc's extra reliability vs x85 wasn't worth it for those companies, but that's a different argument.