Although Sun and Fujitsu had a long-standing business and development relationship, I think it would also have been problematic from a strategy and cultural perspective. My observation with the 3 big Japanese computer companies (NEC and Hitachi being the others) in the 2000s is that they aspired to be major global computer system suppliers--but weren't willing to actually make the investments to make such a thing possible.

I didn't think at the time that IBM was a good fit. I'm not so sure now in retrospect--though they would have had to rationalize the Unix business in particular.