I would add that Novell and Sun also failed through a strategy of focussing on enterprise and government market segements. Google is an open question here, but it's something to watch when a company is under Schmidt-control.
Radioactive RAM chips, costing Sun billions, played a part.
"When Sun folks get together and bullshit about their theories of why Sun died, the one that comes up most often is another one of these supplier disasters. Towards the end of the DotCom bubble, we introduced the UltraSPARC-II. Total killer product for large datacenters. We sold lots. But then reports started coming in of odd failures."
I hated Novell with the passion of a billion burning novas. As only a NetWare admin could. So I was happy to see them tank.
I vaguely recall that Ray Noorda wanted to take on Microsoft, so went on a spending spree to acquire an Office competitor, completely ignoring their NetWare and GroupWise (?) offerings, allowing Microsoft to get traction in both applications servers and directory services.
