Here is how you compete against Microsoft (Score 1)

Fact every company has failed to compete against microsoft has choosen not to repond to microsoft competitive response

Remember the Network Computer, SUN's answer to the PC. When they announced they could save companies thousands in TCO costs. Companies who invested in them could save thousands in the first year alone.

Microsoft responded by creating the managed pc spec. Using a combination of system policies, log in scripts and SMS (system Management Servers) you were able to reduce the TCO to within $152 of the NC

Sun had a proposal to build a PCI card for PCs that had an embedded functionality of the Pico Java chip on it. You could have run Java Apps on your PC with the same speed as you would have gotten on the NC. All for a tiny fraction of the cost of an NC but it did not did not allow sun to take over Sun to take over the chip market from Intel

They could have re written Java to cache the apps on the local machine and added a hard drive for that purpose so that if network connections were lost the program could still work. While it can now do that if they had done that back then Java would not have lost the steam it did for desktop apps