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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."
...should offer to buy them. At a ridiculously low price. Turnabout, being fair play, and all. :-)
Their buyer is SCO?
NOw that would be ironic wouldn't it?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I really, really like Sun hardware, and I'd hate to see it all go the way of the Alpha. Plus, what would happen to Java, I wonder?
PS3 client and Sun server backend for on-line gaming
Over the past three years Sun's stock has declined 92 percent
Gee, do the stock prices of three years ago mean anything? Yahoo and Amazon must also be bought!
Hey, me and my buddies poured out our loose pocket change, and dug around for some coins under the cushions on the couch.... and I think we've scraped up enough to buy Sun ourselves! The first thing I'll do is bring back the "Mr. Coffee" JavaStation, and then fire Scott McNealy. Second step is to get Ed Zander back. Then, PROFIT!!!!!
Why doesn't the open source community take over Sun? Now that would be the day.
N1 is a new IT architecture from Sun. I think it is awesome new technology/architecture, but I also think there is no market for that currently. N1 was in wrong place at the wrong time. There are lot of other things that need to be done before N1 can be implemented anywhere.
What will happen to N1 after the acquisition? IBM already has a similar product callled Tivoli. If IBM purchases Sun, N1 will either be slashed or integrated into Tivoli. Any thoughts on that?
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
It's a rumor, it sells shares of stock. Is it workable? No. However if they were to merge with say Cisco or HP that would be great. Both have their limitations. Sun is way the heck ahead in the 64 bit computer game, having an army of 64 bit gurus, a stable OS, and a very well respected CPU.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Too bad Apple just spent their allowance.
Anyone have an idea what kind of steward HP would be for Java?
To be honest, I'm not sure why anyone would want Sun. Don't get me wrong, they have some great technology and are a good company. But they remind me a little of Digital pre-Compaq buyout, great technology which became irrelevant. The move is towards x86 technology, and with 64 bit x86 become more and more viable, there is simply less and less need for the premium price paid for Sun products.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they'll be dead in a year, just I can't see their sales growing much, and quite possible slowly reversing. There are still some very high end applications where Sun products may well be the best product for the job, but they are painting themselves into a corner - that niche is getting smaller and smaller as x86 gets better and better.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Can I bid for it on Ebay?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I should imagine IBM are after their Java division. They're probably not interested in the servers. Whether they'd just leave them as Sun, or buy the whole lot and wind the server business down over a period of years I don't know. If they do get the servers, expect to see a lot of work go into Linux on Sparc. Mark
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
They've got plenty of [for mods: ill-gotten :)] money, and they've been looking to capture the server market as well.
Don't you see, it's all happening again!
A computer tech company, becoming irrelevant, trying to get bought out!
Can't you see what will happen next?
THEY WILL SUE IBM SAYING PARTS OF SOLARIS ARE IN LINUX!
(/me removes tongue from cheek now).
www.eFax.com are spammers
I dunno... does Apple really want to buy Sun?
Apple would have to capitalize on Sun's strength - the data center.
In addition, they'd have to save some serious operating $$$. To me, that means heading in the same direction in terms of OS and in terms of CPU architecture.
I'm not saying it's not doable. But doing so would mean BIG changes to the customers (either of Apple, or of Sun, or both).
And customers just don't like big change.
Both companies are leaders in terms of technology, and Jobs is pretty darn good at marketing. He is a good desktop visionary. But can he understand the datacenter?
An institutional buyer made a large purchase of Sun Stock. That fueled rumors about a buyout, but it seems a lot more likely that after reporting (admittedly very modest) profits in the last quarter and one analyst recently shifting Sun to buy, some institutional buyer wanted to get some "bargain" stock that they think will appreciate well in the coming years. Given how steady the stock price has been between 3 & 4 dollars, it does seem likely that it's bottomed out, so unless you think Sun is imminently going out of business (which I sure don't) this kind of buy seems to make sense more from that standpoint than from any bs about being bought by a bigger player.
As far as it goes, Sun's culture is so antithetical to IBM and to the "new" HP that I can't see either of them wanting to take Sun on....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I would prefer to see Sun come out with more Intel-competitive products than stick with their niche. They have the potential to make astounding lower-end hardware, and if they could keep the prices low enough it would be fantastic to have more competition with Intel's lines of chips. AMD is proving to be valuable competition, but I'd also like to see more desktop hardware that doesn't aim for compatibility with Intel.
Developers: We can use your help.
At UBS Warburg, Jack Francis, co-head of equity trading, said the sudden surge in price followed a 5-million-share block trade, considered to be a very large buy by Wall Street standards. "That was spurring stories of a potential takeover, which doesn't make any sense at all but did add fuel to the upside," said Francis. "The rumor doesn't hold a lot of weight, but in a market like this it gets people off the fence who are looking for any story that could generate alpha."
Anyway, Sun are currently valued at $12Bn, and have $5.5Bn sitting in the bank.
Sun's stock fell 92% in the past three years? Jesus.
Oh wait. Everyone's stock fell around 92% in the past three years.
[insert witty quote here]
All the anti-Sun FUD that keeps getting posted to Slashdot reminds me of the anti-Apple FUD that was all over the media a few years ago.
Speculation about IBM or HP buying Sun now is probably just as groundless as speculation about Sony or Disney (or Sun) buying Apple five years ago. Yeah, they're not doing as well as they used to, but the whole industry isn't, either.
I think Sun's main problem right now is the same problem that Apple has right now: getting hardware that customers will perceive as being equal or superior to x86 in price/performance. It looks like SPARC will get there eventually, but not soon enough; I imagine they'd either have to use Opteron/Hammer on their low-end machines, or somehow make very inexpensive 1-4 processor workstations and servers to leverage SPARC's scalability (it is, after all, the Scalable Processor ARChitecture) and Solaris's superior SMP support.
I'll admit that I have many reasons to Want To Believe that Sun will still be a strong presence in the industry when I graduate from college, but I do seriously think that rumor's of Sun's imminent death are greatly exaggerated.
Ubi dubium, ibi libertas.
Apple's merging with Sun. They'll call the new company Snapple.
Karma: Excellent (In Soviet Russia, karma pimps YOU)
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'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
Because they already have
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
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.
These kinds of rumors are a recurring phenomenon in this industry. Check for example "When will IBM buy Sun?" which is over a year now.
Sun has a market capitalization of around $12 billion (at its current stock price of $3.75).
To buy it with a good premium would mean a huge investment.
And considering that Sun always stands alone and that its products -- hardware as well as software -- are not really compatible with the rest of the industry, anyone who would buy Sun would only buy its customers. But for how long?
Sun customers are among the most loyal ones.
And you can believe me: I was working for one of its competitors.
While I hate to say HP-UX is a good OS, it is certainly an OS which runs on Itanium and supports 64 processors.
The new HP Superdome machines with Itanium2 are more powerful CPU-wise than anything Sun makes at the moment.
Ewan
Off course, the one company that has not been mentioned is Micro$oft - and they have loads of cash floating around. They can easily buy out Sun, and get rid of one of their most vocal opponents.
Now where did I put my wooden teeth... ?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Face it. Sun sucks. Period.
I've been working with Sun Solaris and Sun SunOne products for the past two years and I have to say I've NEVER gotten worse support from ANY company (yes, even Microsoft, and their support sucks ass).
Example. The person maintaining our Enterprise 220R before me was vary lax about applying patches to the OS. So, I go in to try and clean up and find out there are neary 300 patches to apply after a year and a half with no cumulative patch at all! So, I hunker down and start reading the readmes for all the patches that need to be applied. (I got the list from their ridiculous PatchPro Java app. Just the fact that there is no progress indicator to tell you if it's crashed or still running or what is ridiculous.) I find that some of the patches require downtime. OK... I can schedule that. What else? Some of the patches say that they may actually make the machine non-bootable if incorrectly applied. ! So, I finally call Sun for support on trying to apply the patches. What do they tell me? "Do you have a test box?" Do I have a TEST box!? Fuck no! Why should I need to run a test box for every Sun server I have? To make Sun more money? NO thank you!!! So I decided to say screw this and just procede with upgrading our SunOne Messaging server even though the OS isn't patched, then I'll give the OS a shot later. When I talk to SunOne support, they say, "Do you have a text box?" !!!!!? WTF?! I tell them that I don't. They say, that I can try to do the upgrade but I would be much better off with a test box. I ask them how much downtime can I expect if I apply all the Sun Solaris OS patches and SunOne Messaging patches. They gave me a quick run down and I can expect up to 36 hours of downtime!!! Again I say, W-T F!!!!?
After some discussion with my supervisors, we determine that we wil buy a new box to install a newer version of Solaris and the SunOne Messaging server. I do this. Then I call support to find out how I move mail and users from one box to another. They give me a ton of bizarre and very byzantine approaches to do the same thing. Each tech tells me something different which invalidates what the previous tech told me. As I progress, I get to learn to hate Sun more and more and more. I know it's an alternative to M$, but goddamn!!! In the end, I start to feel that I'd be better off if would just research some open source projects and learn all the little inconveniences they bring considering that al of Sun's products feel like really bad alpha level software. So you can just surmise that I H-A-T-E Sun. Considering the amount of money they charge us for support, I'd really love to see some good service, but this is never going to happen. It just seems that Sun's main philosophy is to work with one hand tied behind their back, one eye missing and the other looking at everything through a prism and a mirror and then learn to cope with it. I for one won't be sorry to see these assclowns disappear.
Fortunately, I've convinced my bosses to NEVER buy another Sun product again. We're an OpenVMS shop with a legacy app that is being ported to Solaris and HP-UX. The company that owns that legacy app really wanted us to go the Sun route, but we chose HP-UX because we are a Digital/Compaq shop. I will be glad to see those HP-UX boxes come in. Fuck Sun.
Anybody wonders, why this rumour was quoted from the Seattle Times .... how far is that from Redmond???
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
IBM current stock price: about $85
IBM current stock price times 10: about $850
Unless IBM was at $850 three years ago, it hasnt even dropped 90% (BTW, IBMs all time high is around $135-$140).
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
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.
No, that's not the only reason people whine about it. I learned C++ and Java at almost the same time (C++ about a year earlier) and I, like a lot of other programmers, can honestly say that IMO C++ is just a better language than Java. It's more compact, easier and more pleasant to write, etc.
You had me right up until "easier". There is a reason C++ journals have sections devoted to obscure sections of the standard and how code might not compile the way you would expect it to. It's because C++ is not simple. Powerul? Yes. Easy? No. Not to mention the differing implementations by different compilers. Ugh. No thanks. I'd rather spend my time working on solutions instead of fighting the language.
I work in IT and a while back there was some talk internally that IBM would be taking over Sun. One of their products, Eclipse, is a not so subtle sign that IBM aspired to take the lead with Java. I believe that going forward the only value Sun would have is Java since hardware has improved dramatically for x86/64bit and PowerPC architectures, and the fact that nearly all of the Sun products that I have had to use are always of poor quality.
.NET will easily take over. I know that IBM will be able to produce the kind of Java technologies we know should have been built years ago, but Sun never got passed suing Microsoft to realize innovation, market share and better products are what matters, not patents and law suits.
By comparison, IBM has done a great job with producing great software and new frameworks. They have also contributed a great deal of software to the Apache/Jakarta and XML projects. They are already the leader in Java technology, Sun just owns the patents and copyrights behind it. IBM needs that to really allow Java to take off.
If you leave Sun as it is for too long, it will kill Java and
I would like to see Big Blue as the driving force behind Java.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
Really? Funny that. Banking is one of the industries that has adopted Java the most. The application server market (what transaction processing systems have evolved into today) are split about 80%/20% between Java (BEA, IBM, and others) and Microsoft. Java dominates transaction processing systems for all new development. It is also a very common choice for legacy software integration.
--Be human.
sun is a technology company. dell is a reseller. for a fortune 500 company, they have one of the lowest r&d budgets. all their r&d is done by intel, microsoft, and the OSS community. all they have perfected is the most efficient way to build a pc and ship it to you, oh yeah, and make cool ads, dude.
sun is a true tech company. so is ibm, and so is apple. you might hate/love each of them, but you can't deny they innovate. dell wouldn't know what to do with java anymore than microsoft would. of course, figuring how much gates' ass mikey dell kisses, guess we know what dell would do to java. and sparc. and solaris. and...
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Does anyone remember when Sun was the little guy, going up against Dec, Apollo, HP and the other workstation vendors? What was the difference?
MARKETING.
Back then, Sun was CLOBBERING those guys with a better message and machines that were just as fast or FASTER for less money, but the main thing is that they were hammering their message constantly and consistantly every where you looked. They were the upstart trying to get people to think differently about technology and it worked.
The problem with Sun is that they BELIEVED everything they said about themselves to the point of anointing themselves as technical genuises, instead of understanding that they won because they had superior marketing than the other guy. They SAID things that got them attention, regardless of the fact that they built things too.
Now, Sun just builds things and everything they say is directed at the technical people, instead of the BUYERS of technology that decide what gets bought and what doesnt. Geeks may recommend, but they dont to the buying; which is based on more than just who has the better technology. Much of the time it comes down to how much a business can afford to buy versus internal costs and other considerations like THE BOTTOM LINE.
It doesnt matter that every programmer in the world knows what Java is, what it does, and why it is a great advance in both platforms and languages. How many people think they can go into a meeting with a CIO and talk about how Java's garbage collection is going to help his company become more profitable? Maybe it can through cost reductions in programming projects, but when is the last time you saw SUN SELL THAT?
I have never seen them make the BUSINESS CASE for their technology beyond it's geek-appeal, and that is why they are dying. At Sun for the last 10 years, the message has always come from it's Engineers, which is totally and completely wrong.
At Microsoft, everyone understands that no matter what we come up with, if Marketing cant sell it, it gets shit-canned (except MS Bob, thanks Melinda) If Microsoft marketing can make a company believe that radioactive rocks in their lobby can improve their bottom line, guess what is going to be developed? MS Radioactive Rocks, thats what.
Sun has had it ass-backwards for a decade, and time has run out on them. Great technology that cant be sold has killed every one of Microsoft's competitors in the same way. How long a head-start did NOTES have over Exchange? Netware over Active Directory? It's the same old story. They pitched to the techie, while Microsoft convinced corporate management that you dont base your business on field level replication, as much as on messaging and calendaring.
This is the same reason that Linux has NO CHANCE to beat Microsoft in the near future. Linux may be wonderful for those of us who want to invest the time in learning to use it effectively, but most people dont want to face the reality that this group of people will NEVER be the majority.
Most people just dont give a shit how it works, they only want write their documents and to get and send their fuckin email with a minimum of issues. That is 90% of corporate computing, and Microsoft owns it.
Sun and others have decided that they can just change what is important in the corporate boardroom, and they cant. The only company that ever had a real chance against Microsoft was/is Apple.
Why?
FUCKING MARKETING, thats why.
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.
Sun's market cap. is 11.9 billion dollars.
Apple's market cap. is 5.82 billion dollars, about half that of Sun.
There are certainly advantages to technology deals between the companies -- both use openfirmware , after all. Rumor even had it that inside apple native versions of MacOS "classic" were built and running on SPARC hardware, and Sun released a version of Solaris 2.5.1 that ran on PowerPC. But I see a merger as being unlikely. Although Quartz on Solaris would be fun!
If Sun is going to be bought, the only deal that makes sense to me would be a purchase by Fujitsu. I can't see Sony jumping into the server business, nor Dell going mano-a-mano with Microsoft.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Boulier
I agree with you that the parent should probably read some more books, but Sun also should be looking more to their worst enemy Microsoft how easy system administration CAN be done. I'm not saying Win2k is easy to admin when you set up a large forest with AD, but applying patches etc, it's darn easy. Sun (and other companies as well) should learn that even professionals do not LIKE it when their job is HARD because the 'tools' they have to work with are very low level and effectually do not help the professional a lot. Tools should help the user, not work against him/her.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
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
In other news, doughnut mogul Krispy Kreme (NYSE: KKD) has placed a bid to purchase high-end computing giant Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: SUNW) in order to secure a first-in-line place for the much anticipated ``blade'' form-factor servers with UltraSPARC IV CPUs to control production, shipping, and doughnut-glazing processes. Officials at Sun Microsystems could not be reached for comment, but a guy hauling garbage out of the rear door of building 7 of the San Diego campus was quoted as saying ``I really like them doughnuts. If they buy us, maybe we'll all get doughnuts for free at lunch. That'd rule.''.
Look out Dell and IBM, when you've got a million doughnut and coffee addicts for your clients, switching them to Unix and Java can't be far behind.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Apple (well NeXT) solved that problem already. OpenStep (cant both to capitalise it correctly) ran on both 68k and x86 machines, and OpenStep software could be compiled to be 'fat', ie including both 68k and x86 machine code so it could be installed and executed on either architecture. Wasnt very popular, but disk space wasnt as cheap in those days as it is now.
Apple must still have that code lying around somewhere.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Because Sun has $12Bn in market capitalization and $5.5Bn in cash on hand, I think the question isn't who's going to buy Sun, but rather who should Sun buy?
I have maintained for some time that Sun should purchase RedHat (current market cap. approx. $1Bn if my sources are correct), go whole hog into promoting Linux, move the advanced features from Solaris into Linux, and turn their hardware into the best darned high-end Linux servers and desktops you ever saw.
First of all, IBM is already trying to do this to Sun with high-end servers. New action is needed to defend that ground.
Second, putting the weight of Sun and the open source devotees behind Linux application development together can help cut into Microsoft's server market share and potentially even make some more desktop inroads.
There's probably no getting Sun out of the hardware business. But unless they harness a mass movement behind the software needed for their systems, they face the prospect of being the Apple of the UNIX server world: well-regarded but largely unused.
Fujitsu is a world-wide manufacturer of computer systems, including the ownership of Amdahl and the competing products to IBM's mainframes that Amdahl has produced for 30+ years. Fujitsu also produces and markets the the Sparc64-based PrimePower series, which do pretty well from a price-performance point of view viz Sun, and scale to the same levels as Sun's big machines. At this time, however, they have decidedly smaller market share than Sun even in Japan. If Fujitsu sees IBM as the long-term competitor globally, then locking down this front and buying into a readily-compatible customer base might make sense. (Some PR on Fujitsu Sparc roadmap here: http://www.ftsi.fujitsu.com/doc/press-releases/200 30312-001.pdf)
"Java sucks ass", Insightful gush /. moderators
/. moderation we've all come to love. And when I say expert and love I am of course using those words in the negative sense.
"Java is very powerful on the server-side" Flaimbait
Another shining example of the expert
Java is a huge server-side force because it is so powerful. Many very high end sites run on Java. JBoss is constantly in the top 10 downloads from sourceforge, and that's not likely because it "sucks ass."
The second component is the high-end server business. The servers are reasonably designed and could give any company like Dell, which does not have a significant server presence, an instant entry into the market. Sun's high-end servers do not have good performance, but that that has nothing to do with its server design. The problem has been the UltraSPARC III, IV, and eventually V.
The 0.5th component is the perpetual license to the SCO Unix source code. The only company which would benefit from possession of this license is IBM.
Sun has other components of its business, but they are essentially worthless. First and foremost is the UltraSPARC development team. It basically destroyed the UltraSPARC's future by designing a processor that ranks among the worst in performance for the last 5 years. Further, the disk storage business is going nowhere.
What is likely to happen is the following. Dell and IBM make a joint bid for Sun. Once they own the company, they will spin off the worthless parts of the business, or, like HP, they will simply fire the nonessential people.
Then, Dell and IBM will partition Sun's business units. Dell will acquire Sun's server business and will make some minor modifications to the processor boards in the highend servers in order to replace the UltraSPARC chips with Itanium 2's. IBM will acquire the Sun's Java business and will immediately place Java under the control of a standard's committee. Further, IBM will acquire Sun's perpetual license to the SCO Unix source code.
None of these useful components of Sun's business has any value to Apple. So, Apple would not be a buyer.
"Number 1) Java sucks complete ass right now."
How absolute BAD are the Moderators when a post like this is "Insightful" (which is totally opinion) and the posts defending Java which state fact are offtopic/troll, etc.
The whole Moderation thing should probably be dropped. This is a total farce.
My team mates and I have been using Linux on our desktops since we arrived at our present position several years ago. However we still can't justify a move from Sun hardware and Solaris. The price point and quality are too good.
If Intel compatible machines would put in OpenFirmware or equivalent, remove keyboard and monitor, and allow power management/console access through a single RJ-45 serial connector at a similar price point we could talk. Sun Fire v100 has this in a 1U for $995 retail.
What I'm trying to point out is that Intel machines have an incredible amount of horsepower but have consistently failed on bringing managability in at a reasonable price.
Further I think Sun is in the course of reinventing itself. They are supporting numerous open source efforts, looking for Solaris to Linux exit strategies, and moving away from proprietary hardware that kept its price point high. Just within the last few generations of hardware look at the changes. Say goodbye to SBUS for PCI, special memory for DDR, standard monitors. Similar to the reinvention Apple has gone through isn't it?
the direction of Sun is what's really important. Less and less market share of hardware, poorly performing architecture on the low and mid range, and their refusal to promote and develop Linux on the high end because of fear it will hurt solaris sales.
I see no future for Sun now that Linux has gained the high end enterprise system features in the kernel, and the related high end datacenter administration tools are in the works.
Sun is dying, and Linux is killing it.
Well, that's a few criticisms I've never heard before. I'll give you compact, and if you want it, a performance edge. But other than that, C++ is a much more difficult language to write real programs in. It requires approaching guru level (well beyond expert) to write a portable system in C++. Language feature interactions in C++ can put a bug into the most subtle of indiscretions.
- Operator overloading is ammunition for the inexperienced to do something that looks cool but is actually extraordinarily unwise.
- Const and const correct sound good until you inform the newbie of the mutable keyword and later find that you don't have const methods after all.
- Templates are similarly powerful/risky. Java will get them in 1.5, but the issues around their effective use are legion
- Using threads in C++ is akin to a black art. I used to literally start any discussion of C++ threads by drawing a pentagram on the whiteboard to remind everyone in the room that we were about to descend into the depths of the various C++ threading models.
- Dealing with other people's screwed up multiply inherited class structures was the only time in my life I've had migraine headaches
- How about syntax-dependent semantics for the static keyword?
- And though I tend to prefer the more explicit hpp/cpp interface/implementation separation, method inlining manages to ruin it right away (without any known benefit since the compiler will inline or not without your hint). Also, do I really need to type so much to get the hpp/cpp separation to work?
- You've still got the C-preprocessor. Have you ever seen how much damage someone can do to code readability with the C-preprocessor? It's worth it to move to Java just to avoid dealing with cpp.
- Portability. Java isn't really 100% portable either, so I'm not going to make that claim. But unless you're able to stick to gcc, porting a C++ app to another system is agonizingly difficult unless you're a guru on both systems. Even then, I'd probably get a whole chicken just to make sure.
Now I agree that Java has its warts and there are plenty of aspects about it that should get attention (jdbc, unicode handling, API conventions, faster elimination of deprecated elements, etc.) but it has some huge advantages as well. The first one, one which almost any other language could take and benefit from, is the deliverable packaging strategy. TheAnd here's the scary/exciting part: C# is awfully close to doing all of that. The only thing that C# doesn't really have is the huge library and the mindshare. The C# library will grow. Depending on how it grows (.net-only or portable), it may get the mindshare. Java has one or two chances left to fix itself before momentum starts building behind C# and the future will be a very interesting time. It looks fairly certain that we'll have C# (and Microsoft) to thank for speedier future changes in the Java language.
Regards, Ross
IBM has done far more to popularize Java than Sun. Just look at the Alphaworks web site. In general, IBM has a better grasp of the software world. The two companies actually have a parallel history. The main difference is that IBM has long since worked through their "we own the world" phase. If IBM were to buy Sun, things would get very interesting.
One thing: last time I interviewed at Apple (97) they were planning to replace Objective C with Java as the main system language. The object models are close enough, and there are a lot more Java programmers. Still hasn't happened. Ideology again?
Guys: do you have an interest in Sun been bought or do you keep pushing these unsubstantiated rumours out of the goodness of your hearts?
I mean, honestly, you have been pushing this crap about Sun for several months now, every single snippet found by somebody about Sun's demise is dutifully put in the frontpage of this well loved, but some times ailing, site.
What is it with Sun that opens a wound with you?
Inquiring minds would like to know.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.