At that time, I remember deciding to prototype a B2B store in Java and then rewrite it in C++ when i will know what i was doing. I never rewrite that soft because Java becomes fast enough overnight.
In a sense, SUN kill itself with Java.
After the crash, you had to basically give that stuff away. I knew a guy who had 10 Sun boxes (all less than 5 years old) at home because a local company wrote them off. I had a couple of low end Ultras (an Ultra 2 and Ultra 10) but sold one of them off. The Ultra 2 I got used for pennies on the dollar at an auction. I think it was like $200 for what was a $15K machine years earlier.
Sun was so far ahead of it time. Solaris was a solid OS, but once Linux became "good enough", somewhere in the '99 to '03 timeframe, depending on industry, it was over for them.