[yakak]

IBM was the other offer on the table. Scott managed to scuttle the deal but his ability to do so was far from a certainty since he was already out as CEO.

Google was pretty much incompatible, they had no interest in workstations or paying for quality as their focus was redundant arrays on inexpensive machines.

Fujitsu was the best actual option for commercial compatibility, but everyone felt it would be a waste of time to pursue that as the USG would almost certainly block a foreign sale.

[sangnoir]

Google bought Motorola, amd that went okay until Samsung blew its top. Recall this was the era Google was frantically buying IP to shore up it's patent portfolio. Apple had gone "thermonuclear", so a somewhat-independent Google-ow ned Sun was in the realm of possibility,perhaps to be sold piecemeal.

[luma]

Those patent wars were largely over wireless patents which Motorola had a lot of and Sun… didn’t.

[ghaff]

Although Sun and Fujitsu had a long-standing business and development relationship, I think it would also have been problematic from a strategy and cultural perspective. My observation with the 3 big Japanese computer companies (NEC and Hitachi being the others) in the 2000s is that they aspired to be major global computer system suppliers--but weren't willing to actually make the investments to make such a thing possible.

I didn't think at the time that IBM was a good fit. I'm not so sure now in retrospect--though they would have had to rationalize the Unix business in particular.