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."

Comments

Apple...

[Anonymous Coward]

...should offer to buy them. At a ridiculously low price. Turnabout, being fair play, and all. :-)

Re:Apple...

[Zeinfeld]

...should offer to buy them. At a ridiculously low price. Turnabout, being fair play, and all. :-)

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.

Re:Apple...

[bob_dinosaur]

I don't think you really understand Sun's core business. It's got nothing to do with the desktop and everything to do with servers.

Sun is hurting because now I can replace my low-end and midrange boxes with commodity x86 kit running Linux for about 10-15% of the cost.

At the mid-to-high-end (16+ processors) Sun is still viable and a good choice (I haven't seen good Intel kit that scales over 8 processors), but the volumes in that market probably aren't enough to sustain the required R&D effort, especially as Sun's consulting business - which would push their kit - isn't great. Still, I like our E10000s... they do the job we ask of them pretty well.

Re:Apple...

[virtual_mps]

Fair enough, but you can't blame Sun for being expensive, then criticise when low cost machines come in.

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.

Also, the 280R's also never been 10 times the price of an Intel equivalent. Equally, there's no Intel box with the equivalent internal bandwidth or 64 bit capability which'll run your enterprise app quite as well.

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!)

The 210s and 240s have great features - each actually has 4 built in Gb ethernet ports!

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.

This wil be sad news...

[zlowry]

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?

Re:This wil be sad news...

[Dan-DAFC]

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.

Re:This wil be sad news...

[The Mayor]

Let's say that IBM has already hijacked Java development (it has). Look at the JCPs that are being released these days. IBM's name is all over them. Despite Sun's control over the standard, they really no longer control the direction for the language. All they control is the rubber stamp that gets attached to libraries that go through the JCP process.

Also, are you suggesting Java become subsumed into .NET, or that .NET gets subsumed into Java? Java (the platform) is more complete and feature-rich than .NET. Java (the language) may be analogous to C#. But Java (the platform) is more analogous to .NET as a whole, only Java is more complete and feature-rich and is available today.

Re:This wil be sad news...

[rossifer]

No it wont. The only places using Java are those god-awful "B2B" shops. I don't see banks running Java on their critical transaction processing systems.

Actually, it just so happens that more and more banks are redeploying their core business systems in Java. Those who haven't done it by now are the laggards who were about to be stuck with a rather expensive manned teller system in a world of largely online banking.

Any and all of the enterprise class frameworks are either built on Java or have Java interfaces (because many of the associated apps that they have to work with are in Java). I'm currently working on an enterprise class contract management system and more than half of the accounting systems we need to interface with expose an EJB interface. Any guesses as to why we'd use that over a SOAP or other simple network protocol? Yep. Transactional security.

Java is overwhelmingly the current choice of enterprise systems development. That could change in the future if Sun went away and wasn't replaced by someone equally credible. But for now, if you're developing an enterprise application and you're not doing it in Java, most customers will laugh you out of the sales call.

Regards,
Ross

stock

[v(*_*)vvvv]

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!

Re:stock

[Blaine Hilton]

It seems once a company goes public they stop worrying about actually make good products and do anything they can to increase the stock price instead of quality.

Need to create a mySQL table?

Power To The People!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!!!!

How about us?

[PaddyM]

Why doesn't the open source community take over Sun? Now that would be the day.

what about N1?

[stonebeat.org]

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?

Re:what about N1?

[nemaispuke]

Tivoli cannot do the same things as N1, unless IBM has added some amazing tweaks to it that nobody knows about or uses. N1 allows a data center to manage its resources based on business rather than technical requirements. The example that was given to the local Sun User's Group meeting was say your web site was being hammered by requests (Christmas). By using the console and selecting the appropriate options, you could do the following: 1. Reallocate bandwidth 2. Build and deploy new web servers to meet the demand (provided you have the hardware available) This is done with one person, not a team of system, web, and network administrators. Most of the technology to support N1 is already in Solaris (Resource Manager, Live Upgrade, Solaris Flash, JumpStart). I don't know about you, but I can find plenty of uses for N1, and companies wanting to shore up their bottom line can as well. IBM and HP are also working on similar technologies, but Sun is farther ahead and has made purchases of companies that have technology Sun needs (Sun purchased a company to get the "provisioning engine" technology for N1). If N1 actually works (and to me it does), there will be a huge change in how data centers are managed. And a lot of IT people could potentially be out of work!

Apple

[porkface]

Too bad Apple just spent their allowance.

Painted into a corner?

[m00nun1t]

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.

Hrmm

[acehole]

Can I bid for it on Ebay?

IBM to buy Java?

[moderators_are_w*nke]

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

Re:IBM to buy Java?

[wfmcwalter]

The Sun and IBM java folks are, informally, intertwined in a number of ways:

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).

Nooooooo!

[wowbagger]

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).

NEWS for nerds?

[elmegil]

More like RUMORS for nerds.

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....

Re:NEWS for nerds?

[LinuxXPHybrid]

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.

Wrong, rose on large institutional investment

[ChrisRijk]

Sun's Rise Likely From a Trade, Not an Offer

• 
  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.

Stock prices

[tedrlord]

Sun's stock fell 92% in the past three years? Jesus.

Oh wait. Everyone's stock fell around 92% in the past three years.

Sun/Apple Doomsaying FUD

[carsont]

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.

EDS?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What would happen to Java?

[rakeswell]

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...

This is sad

[hackstraw]

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.

Sun would make sense to IBM

[abhisarda]

IBM has been making use of Java in its Websphere products and if IBM gets hold of Sun, then it can probably give Microsoft something to think about.

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.

IBM likes Java...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Corner's bigger than you think.

[Ewan]

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

Re:Explain Please?

[jkabbe]

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.

Re:This will be sad news...

[The Mayor]

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.

anyone but dell

[b17bmbr]

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...

SUN is the most serious threat to IBM dominance

[tychoS]

Within the last coouple of years it has become possible to run mainframe software using the CICS transaction manager on SUN hardware. There are a lot of large scale applications using CICS running at large companies worldwide eg. at banks. Before this became a possibility, you could only run these applications on IBM mainframes and compatible mainframes, effectively locking the users of these applications into the IBM mainframe platform.

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.

Wrong direction: Question is, who should Sun buy?

[Elias Israel]

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.

Nice moderation work!

[pivo]

"Java sucks ass", Insightful gush /. moderators

"Java is very powerful on the server-side" Flaimbait

Another shining example of the expert /. 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 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."

Re:I'd LOVE to see the Sun set

[nathanh]

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

Ahh, this should be interesting...

Example. The person maintaining our Enterprise 220R before me was vary lax about applying patches to the OS.

Hrm.

So I decided to say screw this and just procede with upgrading our SunOne Messaging server even though the OS isn't patched,

Hrm?

Then I call support to find out how I move mail and users from one box to another.

Hrm?!

We're an OpenVMS shop with a legacy app... but we chose HP-UX because we are a Digital/Compaq shop.

HRRMMM!

So let me get this straight. You start with a woefully maintained box, left behind by another administrator who didn't maintain it properly, you have zero experience with UNIX (demonstrated by your inability to move user accounts), you are in a self-confessed non-Solaris shop, you don't even have a test environment for a production system, you expect free training from the support desk to do simple tasks (rather than reading a book or doing the Solaris admin course), and then when you don't get everything your way you have a temper tantrum and migrate to... HP/UX?!?!?!?!

You're a freaking idiot.