I administer a cobalt server and I have to say that although the principal of a cheap and simple to run server is a good one, the facts of the matter are that they go wrong at the drop of a hat and it’s often hard to fix them. The support was fairly lame as well - especially after sun bought them - when patches came out they would often break either the email or the web server in ways that could take hours to fix. Not to mention the way they would move the cobalt support site from it’s original home to different parts of support.sun.net every few weeks, presumably in the hope no-one would be able to find the broken patches and keep making the support requests.
Prior to that buyout I had quite a positive opinion of Sun, but as a consequence of it they have really gone down in my estimation- I am glad they are working on the gaming profile, but I absolutely do not trust them to stay with it. In fact I absolutely do not trust them full stop.
I suspect that the ultimate consequence of the cobalt thing will be that the people who use small servers now are likely to be people who are likely to be using bigger servers in future and that Sun will have shot themselves in the foot once again by alienating their own future market.
(or, at least, are growing rather than shrinking - so it’s heading in the right direction), but it’s a little worrying the extent to which Sun tends to all-or-nothing the various pies it has a hand in.