"The company's servers and software helped stimulate the
Internet boom, and its engineering acumen is revered. But Sun never
fully recovered from the previous financial crisis - the dot-com
meltdown - and it has been steamrolled by big shifts in the way
businesses buy their back-end computers.
"Now Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun plans to slash up to 6,000
jobs, or 18 percent of its global work force, as it scrambles to
cut costs to offset a devastating slump in sales of its high-end
servers. Sales of those machines fell 27 percent in the latest
quarter as banks and other big customers went under or couldn't get
loans to buy the servers."
