> it's kinda sad to see a technically visionary set of products reach a dead end (one could maybe even view this as the final commercial death of what Sun built).
I think it's not really the end of the technology, but it is an end to a generally available public commercial offering of it. It sounds like they're still offering services, but only for "single-tenant", which after some careful reading (because I wasn't sure how to interpret that initially), I think means that they'll provide their software and managemest system for private install for large orgs in their private deployments, maybe along with a support/management contract?
That's basically putting technology out to pasture. When you've got a handful of large corporate customers that depend on a product, you can continue to extract money out of them for years or decades without the product having a future.
The question is whether they are still actively pursuing enterprise clients. If they aren't, then I agree. If they are, then it's not putting it out to pasture, it's just a different business model. There are plenty of companies that do this. My brother works for one that does it for large network storage deployments using proprietary technology, and I imagine they don't want to hear from you unless you are willing to put out hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on a deployment (and yet they still have new deployments). I definitely wouldn't consider them putting the technology out to pasture because of that.
I think it's not really the end of the technology, but it is an end to a generally available public commercial offering of it. It sounds like they're still offering services, but only for "single-tenant", which after some careful reading (because I wasn't sure how to interpret that initially), I think means that they'll provide their software and managemest system for private install for large orgs in their private deployments, maybe along with a support/management contract?