All I'm saying is that, even in 2001, it was difficult for a person to by just one or two Sun boxes. Sun didn't care about your business. They had salespeople to ahem qualify you. A hacker needing to get one or two unix boxes up and running was much more likely to buy an Intel-based machine and put Linux on it than buy a low-end Sparc from Sun. As a result, they lost mindshare.
So they didn't care about your business, right? That just means you're not their target customer, right? They didn't seem to lose mindshare with the customers that they were serving now did they?
I'm not Boeing's target market. It doesn't surprise me that they aren't going out of their way to post prices of 777 engines for my perusal.
In the end, you got the product you wanted (cheap Dell) and a business got a customer they wanted (dude with small budget).
I have personal experience with a company that moved off of Linux because they couldn't get decent enough hardware to handle their load. We could trade examples all day long.
The OP made a comment about web pages with pricing. My point was that lots of companies target customers that are not THEM. In fact, they often choose a strategy that allows them to explicitly target those customers that they think are their most likely prospects. Sometimes they get it right; sometimes they don't. Like a lot of things that drive company success, picking the right way to reach customers is an important decision.
Don't forget that Sun was purchased by Oracle for a princely sum. A lot of those Sun customers didn't seem to feel that their dollars were wasted.
