It's a long-term strategy and Sun ran out of juice. The strategy doesn't work by itself; you do the kinds of things Sun was doing to keep the ecosystem active and healthy, and then you release and aggressively promote a commercial Java IDE and make a ton of cash, and build other products on top of the ecosystem that you sustain.

In my opinion Sun's downfall was a serious overestimation of SPARC's performance. They needed to move and get something else out there.

That and buying tech and not taking it anywhere.

- What did they get for MySQL? Nobody was buying Sun kit to run MySQL. There was no move into the LAMP space by Sun.

- VirtualBox? A free desktop-class VM which still hasn't been integrated with any other product or seemingly used to build anything.

"and then you release and aggressively promote a commercial Java IDE and make a ton of cash"

Who pays for IDEs any more?

Uh, lots of people. Visual Studio? That costs rather a lot of money.