A short look into the history of computing of the early 1990s will come to the conclusion that a SUN workstation was the greatest machine on earth. It contains of superior hardware, and was shipped with the SUN operating system. In the early 1990s SUN was equal to the future. It had a revolutionary computer design which was equal to something not seen before.
If we are analyzing the same hardware and the same software with today's eyes, SUn has lost nearly all the magic. On outdated mainstream PC for 300 US$ plus a normal Ubuntu Linux operating system would clone the SUN workstation great. The resulting workstation would have a greater power and more attractive software, then the original SUN computer ever had. What was gone wrong with SUN microsystem that it had lost all the glory?
It wasn't the problem of SUN itself, because we can take any major technology company from the early 1990s and clone the idea with modern cheap hardware. It has to do with the computing industry in general. The idea of building, shipping and buying an advanced computing workstation is not something which is new and exciting but it has become a mainstream product. Each day, million of high-performance computers are sold, and using a multi-tasking operating system which can draw windows and has ethernet connection is not advanced technology, but it's the minimum requirement in the low end PC market.
The difficulty is to identify an area which is the new SUN workstation. That would be a kind of technology which is revolutionary, but isn't widespread available. It's not clear, which company or product has this status, but what we can say for sure is, that former PC companies and software companies are not in that position. It is located outside the silicon valley bubble.