I really respect Jonathan Schwartz, he has made Sun and Solaris worth considering again. He seems to combined the best qualities of a visionary big company leader who understands technology. A geek who can explain things to big business. Not an straight-forward combination.
For along time Sun was the heart of Unix, but with the advent of GNU+Linux and building of the open-source community in the late 90s Sun has fallen well behind the innovation cycle. Currently people do not (in general) create and use products like Xen, Zimbra, Alfresco, or Asterisk on Solaris. Companies like Google and Paypal use Linux at the edge to drive deployment and increase their innovation productivity, maybe leaving Solaris to the backend traditional well-structured heavy loads.
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