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Re: [PLUG] Re: Well, its official -- Sun is serious about being anti Linux and Open Source
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On Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 01:28:55AM -0500, William H. Magill wrote:
> My guess is that Sun is now formally "in play," (as they say in the M&A
> biz), and that one of the Intel based players looking to buy a share of
> the server market will snap them up. Most likely candidate -- Dell.
That's a fair read, but Dell probably won't bite. Sun doesn't add
anything to their value as a commodity vendor. Sun customers buy Sun
because of high reliability (yeah, I know), scalability and redundancy.
If Dell were to buy Sun, they'd probably bungle the best part of the
purchase -- StarCat customers. Dell isn't truly interested in mainframe
scalability and server partitioning, nor are they interested in the R&D
necessary to keep that segment of the business moving forward.
HPQ might be a better suitor, but they'd be loathe to buy another
platform only to spend a decade migrating yet another platform over to
HP/UX and IA64.
IBM's my pick to buy Sun. The reason why it wasn't a good fit before
was because of cultural differences. Now, Sun's got no culture left to
speak of, and talented engineers are talented engineers. (Plus, there's
the Java factor, but that's another story.)
> Lets face it, SPARC customers will be "migrated" over to the IA-64 just
> as HP-UX and Tru64 customers are being migrated over. Yes, I mean
> Solaris running on the IA-64. If Sun doesn't make that commitment, then
> it is going to leave all of its SPARC customers high and dry.
Sun customers will have to migrate away from SPARC over the long haul.
There's no doubt about it. The customer base isn't large enough to
support that architecture for more than a couple more years. SPARC
probably has just one more generation in it before it goes EOL.
But IA64 doesn't sound like the right fit. PowerPC sounds much more
reasonable. IA64 is a bad idea that's surprising only with its lack of
adoption in the marketplace. If Solaris went that way, the deafening
silence would be the last nail in the coffin for both Solaris and IA64.
That big whooshing sound you hear will be the massive installed base of
Solaris users flocking to Linux, *BSD, AIX and perhaps even Mac OS X.
On PowerPC, IBM has both the experience and incentive to keep Solaris
moving forward at the low- middle- and very-high-end. IBM could keep
some of the key values of Solaris/SPARC intact -- like continuing to run
binaries that were compiled ~20 years ago, and maintaining source code
compatability and processor neutrality on a third CPU architecture.
Who knows? With IBM, Solaris may stay a viable for another 15 years.
Z.
ObLinux: If IBM does in fact buy Sun, it'll just strengthen IBM's
leadership in the IT sector, and give it even greater weight as it
pitches Linux and Open Source.
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