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Available To The Right Buyer: Sun Microsystems
antediluvian writes "The Seattle Times reports Sun Microsystems shares surged forward on speculation the computer maker may be bought by a rival company. Prospective buyers could include Dell, IBM or Hewlett-Packard. Computer sales of rival companies have been outpacing sales of Sun's machines. Over the past three years Sun's stock has declined 92 percent."
Anyone have an idea what kind of steward HP would be for Java?
Java.. would at least stick around. Too many financial companies are investing in it. Too many people in general are. Worse comes to worse, someone "buys" java and continnues it, it gets put into the open or the license changes, where it might get perverted..
:)
Getting rid of java is like getting rid of cobol. It's hard, but it'll take a while
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
For smaller server purposes, 64-bit x86 and Itanium may be a more economical choice.
But if you need a large memory bandwidth, I think probably still beats out Itanium, and definitely beats x86.
If you need a whole shitload of CPUs in one box, Sparc is also a better architecture - even if Itanium can scale up to hundreds of processors, there's no OS that runs on it which can properly handle that many.
I am surprised no one mentioned EDS. HP and Dell both want very badly to become like the current IBM, who makes a ton of money on both hardware, OS, and services integeration. I think that should discount HP, Dell and IBM because the merger doesn't bring alot of new things to merged company.
EDS however was the top services company until IBM decided to go into high end consulting and services business. So... it seems an EDS / Sun merger would put them both back in IBM's league. A customer could chose IBM / zOS / db2 / mainframe for a big account or EDS / solaris / oracle / sunfire at a discout.
It also would be interesting since EDS reportedly uses big Sun servers all over the world...
just my $0.02.
I cannot conceive of any Sun executive wanting to be acquired by any company. Besides, they can prevent that by buying back their shares, since they still have $5 billion in bank.
The question was raised in the last event NC03-Q2, and Scott McNealy denied the rumor flat out. I think that he meant what he said and I cannot see how he decides to sell his company to anyone. And again, he and Sun can prevent that from happening.
I'd think that some investor thought it's a good stock to buy. It is true that they had tough time last year, but I think that two things are true:
1. Generally, Sun employees like working for the company. Head hunters are generally having tough time recruiting Sun (star) employees.
2. Customers like their product and service.
When these two are true, it's a good stock to buy even though they are not making great profit this quarter. I am just speculating, but chances are that someone/some institution figured that it's a good time to buy and they bought good chunk.
The Sun java folks used to (until last year) work from two buildings on DeAnza in Cupertino. At least one of these was an ex-Taligent building, and consequently IBM owned the furniture (I think the lease may also have been some kind of sublease thing). One time IBM wanted all their furniture back, and I believe they flat refused to sell it, forcing each Sun java employee to move out of his office into the corridor, while the facilities dudes came and swapped his desk etc. out for an essentially identical replacement.
The sun java folks are now confined largely to Sun's Agnew's development centre, built on the site of the county mental hospital. Given that Cupertino was a totally excellent place to work, and Santa Clara most assuredly isn't, I'd guess that if the IBM folks said "we'll buy java, and y'all can come back and work in Cupertino" there would be a lot of happy people.
One of IBM's largest Java development centres is (waitforit) on DeAnza in Cupertino, right beside the old Sun java building. Both are former Apple buildings, and a bunch of the java folks are ex-apple.
I wouldn't put too much stead in the "disgruntled employees veto the deal" theory, mentioned above. These days, the average Silicon Valley employee cares about 1) do I get paid ? 2) does my commute get better or worse ? 3) do I get to do something that isn't totally crap ? (the former number 1, "will my stock options make me rich?" no longer figures much).
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
I've read a lot of bitter comments on this forum about the fact that java isn't an open technology. This hasn't mattered much to me because of their community process, and otherwise open attitude, and open off-shoot projects (STL, Struts, Tomcat, etc).
I'm not trolling here at all -- I wonder what the implications for Java could be in the face of a buyout. Obviously, that would depend in some part on the buyer. And there would always be the GNU foundations free implementations. OTOH, perhaps a buyout could actually prompt Java to be handed over to a standards board.
These are rumors though, and I can't recall ever hearing a merger/buyout rumor that actually panned out (maybe I just hear bad gossip, though), so I don't put a lot of beleif into this story. It's just speculation about what Sun might do in an x86's world .
I will say that it's interesting to me to see how it's usually not the case that the best technologies survive. However, when looked at from a natural selection viewpoint, one realizes that since the computing ecology is shifted towards MS products, the x86 architecure hardware has an advantage, even though it isn't the best.
Change the OS ecology, and x86 may not be the de facto architecure...
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
I've been thinking that Sun would get bought for a year or so, and I think that it will suck for computing in general. The way I see it, if Sun were to be bought, then their product line would be reduced to their larger machines just like the Proliant servers are pretty much the only thing that survived the Compaq acquisition. This will mean a drastic decrease in the number of people using Solaris, and it will be a nitche/legacy product.
Solaris is an incredibly mature OS. Just read the manpage for the sar command some day. Also there is Trusted Solaris, and F-C2 security certification, etc. Linux is my favorite OS, but Solaris definitely has my respect for its stability, scalability and maturity. And the number of users of Solaris would decrease dramatically if Sun were acquired. Think about how different the Microsoft userbase would be if they suddenly had no desktop presence and were only servers.
However, I also think that Sun should hold in there. I mean a 30% drop in sales, thats almost to be expected in todays economic situation. I mean travel is down like 50-70% in some places. Also one has to keep in mind that Sun machines have a longer lifetime on average than say a PC, so thier volume of sales will be lower in comparison.
Sun does need to get the performance of thier Sparc chips up to the others. Thier performance is a big drawback to the pricetag of a Sun machine. But everything else about thier hardware is top noche. I mean they are so anal with their hardware that they put lot numbers on each of thier ethernet cables. And their machines are just perfectly engineered. Any box that I've been inside of, I never thought "Why the hell did they put that there?".
But, who knows maybe this will be a good thing. I mean all of their employees will go to work somewhere, and maybe Solaris and NFS sources will be opened up.
However, if it were up to me, I'd just prefer Sun sticked around for a while.
HP would not even bother about Sun right now because it does not want to bite off more than it can chew. Investors would not at all take kindly to the acquistion of Sun by HP. HP right now is trying to fend off the dog that is Dell. HP does have about 13.2 billion $ in hand (Biz Journals) but it will probably not want to mess with it right now.
Removing Sun from the competition would help the server market by bringing some consolidation.
What will IBM do with the Sparc chips? It is not likely to dump it for a while but after 2-3 years it may just move to Itanium and its own PowerPc chips.
Sun has already brought in x86 systems in the lower end. Both Sun and IBM are adopting AMD's Opteron for lower and mid level systems.
We have also got to remember the FTC. If IBM does bid for Sun then expect them to go through a tough scrutiny so as to avoid a monopoly status in the high end server industry.
People know that Sun is able to keep customers only by chanting the reliability and customer satisfaction song. Its Ultra Sparc's are falling behind in performance and it is probably only with the Sparc V's that it can gain any semblance of competitiveness. And when are the Sparc V's going to come out? 2005 at the earliest.( News)
Would Dell bid for Sun? Dell certainly can because it does have quite a bit of cash sitting around 9.1 billion $ as of Dec 2002 (Motley Fool and Yahoo ).
What is Sun's market capitalisation? As of March 19, it was about 10.73 billion $.
Dell does not have a foothold in the high end server market because it does not spend much of R & D as opposed to HP, IBM and Sun. Acquistion of Sun could be a easy way to compete with HP and IBM. Dell's entry could help reduce the prices of high end servers like Dell has done to the desktop market.
If this story is indeed true then it would be the most talked about merger. Competition for customers paying money for big tin has only gotten worse after the tech meltdown.
Personally I feel that the Sun bid is just a rumor like the Universal/Apple deal. If anyone is to believe it, then Sun or whoever is buying them have to publicly state that they are looking into this deal. Maybe the coming weeks will tell us more.
I bet it's IBM - they have invested a lot more in Java than Sun has over the past 2 years; and Java fits in with their old strategy of one platform running on several different levels of machine; and IBM also has a history (and the cash) of buying up expensive companies for just one aspect of them.
I guess we'll see.
Java will not be disappearing any time soon. Too many big name companies (most notably IBM and Oracle) have invested too much money in Java for them to let that happen. Also, with the way that Java is developed, through the Java Community Process, any potential buyer would find it difficult to exert full control over the the technology. For a closed product, Java is pretty open.
IBM would be the most obvious candidate as Java and particularly open-source Java offerings (such as the Jikes compiler and Eclipse IDE) are a big part of their software activities. They develop their own IDEs and app-servers and ship JVMs for several platforms that have routinely out-performed Sun's equivalent offerings.
It would also be interesting to see how the SWT vs Swing issue would work out if IBM were to become Java's new guardians. Swing is the Sun graphics toolkit for Java and is the standard for client-side Java. It's fully platform independent and uses pluggable look-and-feels with lightweight components to emulate the look and feel of the native platform. SWT is IBM's alternative that is used in the Eclipse IDE. It's not quite so portable as it provides an abstraction on top of the native windowing system but it has advantages in terms of performance and closer integration with the underlying system. It breaks the write-once-run-anywhere philosophy but is growing in popularity.
Oracle could be another contender, they too use a lot of Java, particularly for their client-side tools (which it has to be said weren't very good last time I used them) and they partner with Sun on the database/hardware front.
Apple could be a dark horse, they have a vested interest in Java. In a world where the desktop is dominate by Microsoft, the availability of Java software is a good thing for them as it means there will always be software that runs on Macs. They have put a lot of effort into supporting Java in MacOS X and gone further than other operating systems to help Java applications fit in with the look and feel of the platform.
A lot of people don't realise just how much Java coding is going on out there, because most of it is hidden away on the server side. This site claims that Java is the world's most popular programming language by some distance (though you may argue about the accuracy of their method of measuring these things). I also read elsewhere (can't find a link) that there are more lines of Java being written these days than any other language.
Suck figs.
IBM purchasing Sun would be a big win in my opinion. HP has yet to prove that they really have a handle on the software side of their company, while IBM has done more with Java and Linux than Sun ever did. Of course they might also screw Sun up even more in trying to merge it into the corporate behemoth of IBM.
Please no! They might win the auction.
Apple are in prime spot to displace Sun these days. They are the only UNIX vendor committed to a proprietary UNIX that is likely to still be on offer in ten years time. IBM has already all but said it has thrown in with Linux. HPUX, Digital Unix, Irix etc are already niche market plays.
I don't think solaris can survive, simply too few seats to be viable except as a niche. It is bound to a single hardware platform which is itself starting to look old and tired with not much hope of fending of Pentium long term, let alone Itanium.
Apple on the other hand have a really strong desktop business by any measure but Microsoft. They have probably shiped more UNIX systems by now than any other vendor, their kit is robust and mature. Sorry Sun, you never did crack the quality manufacturing thing the way DEC did. So now you charge DEC prices for FIAT reliability.
The other major problem Sun has is Scott. Unless he is gone by the end of the year Sun is dead. Scott has been spending his time on futile rants about Microsoft who don't even make hardware - his core market while Linux, IBM and now HP eat his lunch.
I was eating with a senior exec of a major (F100) company who used to be a Sun shop. Scott had gone out to talk to them and his answer to everything was about stopping Microsoft. So the company concluded that they better switch from Sun quick. I then heard the exact same story a couple days later from another F100 company exec.
The single best thing Jobs did at Apple was bury the animosity with Microsoft. He told Apple that they were going to be something so different from anyone else that what happened at Redmond did not matter. He was right, he realised that the 'Network Computer' that had been developed would flop in that market but had the potential to be a killer entry price machine with a few cosmetic tweaks - and the iMac was born.
Sorry Scott, but now it is you or the company.
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This area is the last large market segment IBM mainframes has, where they are the only player, so this is a serious threat to the IBM mainframes and therefore to all the services&support contracts, and peripheral systems that comes with IBM mainframe ownership.
The recent 100+ CPU servers from SUN and compatible Fujitsu machines as well as their mid-range machines with "hot-swap everything", and everything possible done to make software running on them 24x7x365 capable even while the hardware and OS is being upgraded, is another area where SUN is fast becoming a serious threat to the marketshare and market dominance of AS/400 and mainframes from IBM.
For these reasons alone it would be a very smart move if IBM were to acquire SUN, because it will remove a very serious competitor for from the marketplace.
I don't think I'd say Apple has a proprietary UNIX. Their UNIX is open. It's the fourth (5th? 6th? Hard to keep track anymore) OSS BSD. I don't think any closed unices are going to survive. Apple played it smart by locking down as little as possible -- just the part that makes the users drool. Developers are happy because it's all open and available and such, and users are happy because it's a beautiful system where you never have to open Terminal.app.
I think Apple has some incredibly smart people and they definitely played the OS X thing right. I don't think it would have worked if their Unix was propietary.
So yeah, other than that niggle (and it is just a niggle), I think your post is right on.
"Whatever can go wrong, will." --Finagle's Law
Sure I can. The new machines are attractive, but we've already jettisoned most of our suns--so the question isn't whether the new machines are nice, but whether they're nice enough to justify another platform change. The answer to that question is, "probably not". I still would like to get some and give them a chance, but it will be a hard sell to get me to tie myself back to sun at this point.
I'm not sure I used the figure 10x, but the 280R is certainly a lot more than the entry level price for an x86 dual-processor system. Also remember that the V100/120 have a IIi processor, which made the 280R the real entry point for any sort of cpu-intensive application in sun's rackmount lineup. So for a cpu app you had a choice between a $1k or $2k intel rackmount or a 280R...
And the intel box would probably be a 1u, which is much nicer from a rack density standpoint compared to the 4u 280R. (The 280R takes a lot of space for what it's doing.) Can the 280R do some things a 1u intel box can't do? Sure--but the number of apps that need those feature is fairly limited. (If there were more demand for those features I'd have more 280R's, sun would be making more money than dell, and sun wouldn't have introduced the much smaller and better priced 210's and 240's.) Even from a capability standpoint there were some nutty things about the 280R that made it somewhat less attractive than it might have been. (Single 100Mbps ethernet, only 40MB/s SCSI included, only one pci slot running at more than 33MHZ, and that only at 66MHz, only 2 internal disk drives--in a 4u box!)
I stand corrected. I could have sworn the last datasheet only had 10/100 listed, but I might have been thinking of a different line.