I want to clear something up. LE absolutely did NOT buy Sun because of its HW biz. He knew that traditional biz was in decline and not salvageable. In fact, HE was in part responsible for the elimination of one of sun’s highest margin markets. For example, he launched a major shot across Sun’s bow around ‘02 or ‘03. At the time McSquealy, et. al., were happily selling E10Ks to telcos, ISPs, hosting companies, etc, to run heavyweight billing software. Suddenly, companies started running that SW, in this case Keenan, on RAC clusters of mid-weight iron, like V880s. It ran great, and that E10K high-margin market vaporized overnight! All that high-margin revenue was suddenly re-directed to Oracle RAC licenses! Wow!! McSqueely and gang practically had kittens!!
Roll forward a few years to when IBM almost bought Sun. Oracle was heavily leveraged on... wait for it... JAVA. Fusion Apps were written in Java, the middleware stack was all Java, and Larry was suddenly faced with the possibility of IBM gaining control of the technology that he was so heavily leveraged on. Talk about a near-cardiac event! So when IBM balked after the Sun BOD tried to milk a few more cents/share out of them Larry swooped in and in seemingly just a matter of days, he was suddenly the proud owner of Java! And for the measly sum of $8B (about what he paid for a small-ish software company, BEA/weblogic, just a few years before).
So for the Sun hangers-on who somehow still think LE gave a cr^^ about their servers I have news for you - he didn’t!! Sure, it was a throw in that he has tried to milk since, but Java was the only thing he really cared about. Deal with it!