Upward or downward spiral?
Sometimes it looks like an upward whirlwind might occur, Oracle is (supposedly) providing new investment, new CPU'sare set to come and new OS features will come to keep Solaris current, encourage interest and new sales and further development will grow etc. You start to hope your company architects will again inisist on decent hardware instead of x64 crap (how many x86 system hangs have we seen, resets that occur with no feckin idea why, no crash, ilo unresponsive to breaks or sysrq's so not OS dependent) vs getting good crash dumps/breaks and so forth on sparc.
Other times it looks like they are just milking existing companies, demanding platinum contracts, ahem : "premium", and yet the corporate tossers are pitching offshore support folks as worthy of the premium contract money. Whoa!!! Six months ago they were handling the bronze and silver, why the f@ck are they now worth platinum (ahem, premium) contracts??
Linux is f@ckin immature, one glance at the VM management approach (like RHEL6 beta bringing executable pages vs buffer cache differentation which is Solaris 7 / 8 territory) or lack of dtrace, zfs etc but el-cheapo prices drive the OS sales. It's not good OS features driving the hardware sales, it's the other way around.
Doesn't help when plebs at the top hold the purse strings who have no idea what doing an RCA actually means and platform differences in achieving that.
Lots and lots of sympathy beng provieded to the VMS folks out there.....