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Can someone remind me why Google didn't buy Sun when it was on the market? The culture seems like it would have been a relatively good fit and their use of Java related technologies (obviously now) would have made ownership of those technologies useful.

Had they bought Sun and then sold off the hardware side of the business they would have bought a lot of solid engineers and IP.

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In hindsight, it might have been cheaper to buy them outright than to litigate a battle like this. Then again, they're going to have some undisclosed settlement, so we'll never really know how it ends up.

I'm guessing they didn't buy them because of the business they were in. Selling workstations + Solaris was only part of their business. I think the services part of their work was bringing in more money towards the end. As far as I'm aware, Google doesn't do much in the services realm, which probably factored big into their decision not to buy.

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