No, Oracle at the time was big on the "fullstack" play, and thought Sun hardware could provide the last piece of the puzzle: selling absolutely everything to a business, from metal to apps and services, in one neat box. Java would have been safe with IBM too, that wasn't much of a worry - although I'm sure Ellison hoped they could leverage it against competitors invested in it, like they tried to do with Google.

The enemy #1 for Oracle at the time was SAP, which they couldn't force out because it's another cancer (the lock-in is huge); so they developed a strategy of buying loads of ecosystem apps to "surround" it. At that point, they could sell the database and apps in one package, and then slowly erode sap away. Hardware was a natural addition to that strategy.

Unfortunately they borked execution. They didn't invest properly in making solutions ready-made, so after you bought a (very expensive) box, you still had to pay tons to consultants to set it up, making it uncompetitive on the whole. The industry shift to cloud did the rest. Now they're way too busy turning into "bigger Salesforce" to care about metal.

I meant it more in the sense of how an old friend/rival could respectfully carry their casket to the grave, as opposed to the way Oracle desecrated and devoured the flesh of the corpse.

That Oracle is moving to Linux on Sparc tells you they still think there is an enterprise business that Exadata/x86 couldn't win (after years of destroying Solaris). IBM+Sun would have been most of the E-biz and those customers would have been more comfortable with Oracle as just the DB provider.

Solaris on PPC existed at various times, IBM could have provided a convergence path for the Fortune 500, AIX/Solaris/Linux/Java all on PPC.

It was actually a close thing, but someone else will have to write that story.

> ... why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun?

IBM Services do a lot of support work for Solaris around the world.

But yeah, other than that it doesn't make a lot of sense.