People started moving away from Solaris/SPARC in droves as soon as Oracle acquired Sun.

An example: the "old" Sun gave me a loaded T1000 system to run SUNHELP.ORG on.

The "New" Sun wouldn't even give me Solaris patches / security updates (which used to be free) without a support contract.

I had to eventually move the site to being hosted on a Debian box because I couldn't afford the hundreds of dollars they wanted every year for patch access.

It really chapped my hide. I'd even been part of the external OpenSolaris release team.

The "old" Sun recognized and encouraged the hobbyist community - that if people played with older gear at home, they were more likely to recommend/spec it at work... Solaris and patches/updates, software suites (LDAP server etc) "free unless you want/need a support contract".

"New" Sun after the Oracle acquisition: "Unless you're a business paying us money for support, we don't care, and you get NOTHING."

So, people stopped using and playing with Solaris/SPARC at home, and eventually stopped using it at work too.