That's the problem: You shouldn't care about how well a SPARC desktop runs Firefox. You should use such a box to develop software that run on a 32 or 64-thread machine.

We must be prepared to deliver performance on many-core machines because that's what the desktops and servers will be in the near future.

And that's why Sun should investigate cheap desktops that could be used to run and develop - they have a uniquely viable platform for that and they have it today. Any software built for those boxes will run better on their servers.

As a personal favorite, they should work their asses off to make sure "fashionable" languages like Python and Ruby do threading decently on those chips. If I have to select a web server and I have a US$ 20K server with a 4-thread x86 and a US$ 20K 32 thread SPARC, I will probably go Sun's way.