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Should Sun Just Fold Now?
KE1LR writes "The Silicon Insider at ABCnews.com is taking the position that Sun Microsystems, creator of the SPARC architecutre and, oh yeah, Java, should just give up and close shop instead of continuing to wither. I agree that Sun would have to have to do something dramatic to avoid what is looking more and more like an inevitability at this point, but what could stop this slide toward the same fate as DEC? Might they have anything in the works that could save them? What could it be?"
How does folding the company stand a chance of increasing shareholder value? Would the board legitimately be able to follow this course of action?
Also do you think anybody would invite them to work at their company after that?
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Yeah, but Apple still has a loyal following and a product that is clearly differentiated from its main competitor, Microsoft. With the ease of porting software from Solaris to Linux, and the increasing robustness and enterprise support, it's not clear that Sun can keep the same kind of hold on its user base.
"Sun is not coming back. It is a giant company without a business."
I think the article went a bit too far in predicting Sun's demise. Whilst it's true that the rating of their stock is poor and they have really failed in many areas where they would have liked to succeed, I'd say there are signs they may be coming back.
Now they have a collaboration of some description with Micro$oft; it's hard to get an ally with more punch than them, regardless of what you might think (or indeed Sun and Scott McNealy might think!) of them.
They finally seem to be realising that you can't have both the hardware and the software market. Look at IBM and Apple for precedents there. Sun has started a new price war on Linux and Windows on the x86 platform.
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
It's not as if a company with a market cap of of 13 BILLION dollars can just cash out and walk away from the table with 13 billion dollars.
Like is or not SUN, has to keep playing the game. It would loose even MORE money by trying to close up shop quickly.
A company has value for lots of reasons, besides pure, resellable assets: market position, reputation, etc.
What SUN needs is leadership like that which has helped Apple so much in recent years. If you look back far enough, you'll see a time when Apple was in quite a similar postion as SUN is today.
I'm not saying that SUN should start building sPods and sBooks. I think SUN needs to find its place in the market (hint: not the same place as Apple or Dell).
Life is too short to proofread.
Delusional Mac Zealot alert.
Sun can barely get corporations to buy Solaris/Sparc solutions, and that's robust proven platform that's been in the field for years.
There's just no chance for Sun to push Apple stuff on customers. Macs have all the downsides of Suns (proprietary, single-vendor, not-Intel), and none of upsides (scalability, software base). Two dwindling vendors does not equal a powerhouse.
The answer: because everyone loves the "zero sum game".
...), but are massively opposed to each other.
You see it all over the place now. Someone must win, and the other guy loses. This is what so confounds all of the pundits when Apple comes out with things like the iPod and dominates that market. In their mind Apple was supposed to just give up since they couldn't "win" vs. PCs.
Its this kind of simplistic thinking that even made Microsofts monopoly come about. Its why we have two political parties who sometimes do not differ one iota with respect to certain policies (DMCA, government spending, easy treatment of big business,
Everyone's got to be right nowdays, and that requires that someone else must be wrong.
Any pundit who makes his living predicting X will die, Y will go under, Z is now irrelevant, doesn't deserve to be listened to, they haven't thought hard enough to deserve it.
Because we all know that market cap is truly the way to judge the health of a technology company.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
and stopped wasting time developing and maintaining, for example, their own version of tar or find.
The versions of these utilities that come with proprietary Unices are, frankly, CRAP.
openssh is another one; think back to last year... and the flurry of ssh patches. Linux easy! Solaris hard! Go figure.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Silicon Graphics, another early bay-area unix workstation success, was in a much smaller niche, even at its peak. SGI has been circling the bowl now since the late 90's and still hasn't gone away. They barely even lost any money last quarter.
Sun has a much more stable market of business buyers. They have to be selective to get back to profitability, but it's definitely possible, even without a radical change in market. People still pay big money for mid-range and high-end servers. People still pay big money for solid enterprise software. Business customers are willing to pay real money for real solutions. A company like sun just needs to make sure that it solves today's hard problems, and does it at a price that's similar to the competition.
A slump doesn't mean a fall. A re-org doesn't mean a death knell. Sun has lots of chances left to redefine itself, and figure out how to be profitable. They just might have to lose market share and girth in the process.
While Sun's competition all sell Windows as well as UNIX and Linux servers, Sun has refused to play in the Windows game. Sun was never big enough to compete directly with the ranks of IBM (AIX) and Hewlett Packard (HP/UX) on both the UNIX and Windows front.
Sun started as a specialist UNIX based Hardware vendor. A great majority of Sun's popularity thoughout the 1990s was directly attributable to the UNIX specialist hardware at a fair price. Specifically their small-business and department entry-level servers.
Pound for pound Sun Hardware is still cheaper than HP/UX PA/RISC hardware or IBM AIX Power/PowerPC hardware. HP/UX and AIX are also at risk, but HP and IBM have more than ample funds to cater to selling extrememly inexpensive Linux based servers. Blue and Brown both are willing to relegate UNIX to Large Scale installations only. Sun's 'entry class UNIX servers', once thier bread and butter, have now been outclassed by Powerful Linux solutions.
Smartly Sun now also sells Linux based servers - but their servers do not have the assumed Windows/Linux flexability of the commodity hardware servers sold by the competition.
My point is - Sun is dying because of IT purchasing agents, like me, who are not willing to buy vendor lock (lock into Linux / lock into Windows). Because Sun isn't prepared to play in Windows, they suffer.
I agree that Windows has something to do with it, but I don't think it's as direct as you propose.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Riiiight. The problem with eating away from the bottom is that it makes you a bottomfeeder. If that's truly what SUN has become, then so be it.
.NET, the only real comparable thing is Java. Fair enough. On the server side, there's always Linux and the other *nixes...and Novell, I suppose. On the desktop, Linux and Apple. MS Office -- OpenOffice (many thanks to SUN for opening that up...now it can survive)
Java is all they've got...that and funding from Microsoft in the form of a settlement. It may only be a matter of time before they get embraced and extended the way anyone that gets all nice and friendly with MS gets used.
So let's enumerate the competition against MS -- for
In the end, should SUN fold? Probably. Will they? Of course not. We'll watch this thing drag out year to year and get frustrated as it goes on like an impending train wreck in slow motion. The most interesting (and saddest) thing here is watching the MS influence on how it happens.
What exactly does Sun have to offer in such a merger? Sun's big attributes are UltraSPARC, Java, Solaris, and some knowledge about big server engineering.
Apple has no need of UltaSPARC, it's already made its deals with IBM for the PowerPC line, which is looking like a pretty good bet these days. Apple has as much Java as they need right now, I don't think Sun's Java expertise is going to bring much to the table. Solaris is of no use to Apple whatsoever really. Big servers - well that is something that Apple lacks, but they re beginning to make some slow but steady server progress on their own with the Xserve line - I don't think they are that desperate for a huge shot in the arm in the server market (let alone the conflicting chip architectures and OSs involved in expanding that way!).
No, it's Apple that has value to offer Sun, because right now Sun is making a bid for the desktop, and that is Apple's true strength right now.
That means there will be no merger. Sun might try buying Apple, but I think that would be rather too expensive for them right now.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Because the company is public and that means a bunch of people's retirement rests on the money that is in it. As an investor, would you want to finance the shrinking of your dollar to 10 cents or would you rather have the company's assets sold for 30 cents? Sun doesn't exist to give us Java, they exist to make money for their stock owners. If they can't do that, they owe it to their stock owners to terminate in the way that returns the greatest portion of the money possible.
Sorry, it's not just that PCs are cheap. IMHO Sun has forgot how to design a CPU. Or a chipset. Sorry, 1.2 GHz just doesn't cut it, no matter what IPC you have. Doubly so when the best you can offer with that CPU consists of:
- SDR RAM in an age when everyone's moved on to DDR
- 32 bit memory bus, when even the original Pentium in the 90's had a 64 bit bus
- crap outdated components and cards at ludicrious prices (E.g., is that an ancient ATI Rage that they're selling for almost $500? Well, gee, in the PC world you can already get a GeForce 6800 for that kind of money.)
Sorry, Suns just don't cut it. You'd need somewhere between 8 and 16 of the latest UltraSparcs in a box, to even touch a cheap 4 way Xeon for a server. And you can check out for yourself what the Sun would cost in that configuration.
Charging that kind of ludicrious prices was justifiable when they at least had the bang to claim _some_ advantage over a PC. Not when a Pentium 4 or K8 or G5 (pick your favourite there) is running circles around the UltraSparc.
Sun has fallen so far behind the technology curve, it's not even funny. And firing most of their R&D stuff doesn't give me any confidence that they'll spring back to having a competitive computer any time soon either.
Honestly, I just can't recommend a Sun with a straight face any more. Do you want a unix-y workstation? Get a cheap PC, install your favourite linux distro on it, and there you go. It'll run circles around a Sun. Do you want a RISC Unix workstation? Get a Mac. (And I'm not even a Mac fan.) Do you want a Unix server? Same thing.
Will they die? Strictly speaking: probably not. They can always turn into yet another Dell, packing together PCs from components made by others.
But it sure won't be the same Sun. In a sense, the old Sun as we knew it, _will_ die. To be mean: and in a sense, good riddance.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
When I was learning to drive, a thing my driving instructor said to me has always stuck with me. He said the thing that causes most driving accidents is indecision.
I think companies like Sun (and Corel and others) start to fail when they become indecisive. They need to decide on their path and stick to it, rather than dressing up in a penguin suit one day and mocking linux the next.
These guys are not selling dog food over the interweb-thingie. They have been around for ~22 years, and have a rather long history of building extremely robust hardware in the server space. (I specified server space because the Ultra5/Ultra10 and the low-end Blades are not great.)
No, I am not a Sun fanboy; I like most of their hardware, and I like Solaris. I just believe that people shouldn't treat Sun like the flash-in-the-pan goofy "technology companies" that made the bubble possible.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
But PCs aren't going to threaten Suns bread and butter any time soon: Big Iron, and support contracts.
When you need BIG Iron, with mutiple redundant blah blah, high throughput, blah, etc. you don't have much choice but to get a BIG ASS Sun, and send them a healthy check it's support. This is especially true for governments and financial instutions, the majority of which have huge databases run on mutiple top-of-the-line Suns around the world.
Sun ain't going nowhere.
Sun's biggest competitors are IBM and Hewlett Packard. Apple computers use IBM PowerPC chips. -- It's the same reason that Burger King restraunts started selling Coca-Cola products when Pepsi purchased Taco-Bell and KFC... Buying from your competition is bad business.
Apple is a desktop provider first. Apple sells servers as well, but only because of the demands for such hardware from companies that have standardized on Macintosh. Sun is a server company first, they have never had the capability of dealing with the commodity business of desktop hardware. The priorities of these two extremely different companies would never mesh. Thus the Culture would always run amok with the competing priorities.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
AMD64 and Itanic are threatening Sun's bread and butter. That's why they're trying to get their ducks in a row so they can attack the low end. Managers usually want to stick with a single provider for all software and hardware. If Sun can provide everything top to bottom, they'll be a much more attractive option.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I'd rather see Sun completely re-assess their position and find out how they can leverage their core strengths (technology innovation, experience at the server side of computing, understanding of how to use the network as a computing machine, etc.) and implement a new strategy based on those strengths.
IBM re-invented itself. Apple re-invented itself. Sun is capable of doing the same.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Because Sun isn't prepared to play in Windows, they suffer.
That is like saying "because Ferrari isn't prepared to build economy cars, they suffer". You seem to be missing the point: Sun's real market is not the commodity-server area where Windows is popular. Sun shines* in the area of 8+ CPU machines that actually have to a) bear a heavy load and b) stay up while doing so.
* D'oh.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
It's not about speed. It's about reliability.
-30-
The problem is, Sun is still good at doing one thing: Java. And they're great at it. And by the way, there's really no replacement for it: not Python (yet), not .NET (yet), and certainly not C++. Can Java survive without Sun, by the strength of IBM alone?
Finding God in a Dog
Exactly -- which is why you rarely see mergers & buyouts in the UNIX world. Its much cheaper to steal your competitior's customers than it is to buy them.
Look at HP -- 3 versions of UNIX, 4 CPUs with more coming, VMS. Its a fucking mess that will take 10 years before you see the payoff.
the sooner that learning MIPS becomes less revelant, etc....
Sun's primary architecture is SPARC, not MIPS, although Sun is now also shipping x86-64 (AMD Opteron) servers. Sun at one time used Motorola 680x0 processors.
In any case MIPS is relevant because, like ARM, it is the core of many "system on chip" processors used for things like TiVo series 2 boxes and tons of other consumer electronics devices.
If anything, Sun's recent rollout of cheap Linux/Java boxes followed by Sun's failure might be seen as a failure of Linux and of Java. So in that regard, a failure there could hurt Linux.
My other first post is car post.
a rather long history of building extremely robust hardware in the server space.
The article actually mentions a specific moment when the author understood that Sun has no future. It was when listening to a story about a tour of Google facilites -- the Google CEO pointed to the rows and rows and rows of cheap and semi-obsolete hardware which is Google server farm and said that Google will never buy expensive servers again.
The MRCH (Massively Redundant Cheap Hardware) approach is BOTH cheaper and more reliable. Sun IS screwed.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Can your cheap 4-way Xeon dynamically remove a failed processor from the running system? Can it dynamically remove a memory bank from use if it fails?
Of course not.
However, how many customers actually need this? Can a Linux cluster do as well? Because with the cluster, you can swap out entire computers without taking the cluster down.
So the question is not whether one Xeon PC can replace one Sun server, the question is whether cheap commodity hardware (probably clustered) can replace a Sun server. When you add up the hardware, the electricity, and especially the salaries of the IT guys to maintain it, is the cluster a better deal than the Sun server? (I don't know the answer for sure, but I'm guessing it probably is. Consider Google and their massive farm of cheap PC hardware.)
And even if the Sun server is still slightly cheaper this year, will it still be next year?
The 90's will never come again for Sun. Either they need to find a different way to make lots of money, or they are toast.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
He spelled McNealy's name 'McNeely'. Like ten times. If the author couldn't even get the name of a corporate CEO who has been prominent in technology for the last two decades right, why should I give one whit what he has to say about anything?
Maybe it's time for a certain broadcast news organization to 'just fold now.'
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think you missed what people are looking for.
Wall Street is looking for ROI. That's it. You're in niche market which is static? Good - maximize profits and spin off dividends, lots and lots of bug fat dividends. Or provide ROI by an increasing stock price.
Micro$oft, when growing, didn't pay dividends - but was well beloved because its stock price kept increasing. Now that its stock price is no longer ballistic it is going to have to start paying a dividend (start paying out some of that billions it has as a war chest) in order to interest investors. (yes, I know, MicroSoft is doing so)
Some of the darlings of Wall Street are utility companies. They're not growing - but if run well they spin off money hand over fist. Large, consistent dividends for all. Investors love that.
There are many thousands of niche companies that aren't going anywhere (I've worked for quite a few) They aren't growing; fixed set of customers; their stock price isn't going to go ballistic; but they're *consistently* profitable.
And that is what Wall Street wants. No unpleasant surprises. Pleasant surprises are always welcome. Return on Investment.
SUN has a niche. A very profitable niche. But reality is that the niche is under assault from many sides (HP, IBM, Dell, Linux, ya name it) The niche isn't growing; the niche may be shrinking. SUN - in order to attract investment - is going to have to (a) prove that it is well protected in its niche (which is probably no, but can be debated. On one side we have WANG and DEC; on the other side we have IBM still making lots of money off of Big Iron) (b) return something, be it increasing stock price or dividend from profits, to investors.
I agree with others - people have called SUN dead before and it has made a comeback. As Andy Grove would say, SUN seems to be at an inflection point. I think what many of us are noticing is a lack of a consistent vision or plan - a lack of "THIS is what we're going to do!" Their plan seems to be more a Flavor of the Week. People at SUN may disagree, but from out here in the grandstands the perception is that y'all are doing a lot of flailing around.
Yes.. and on that side of the board, they have IBM mainframes beating them. SUN's niche has been between these two extremes of cheap, unreliable commodity hardware, and expensive ultra-reliable mainframes.
Unfortunately, this niche is disappearing as the PC's get better and more reliable, and the mainframes have gotten cheaper and started to move into the old UNIX-server market.
(Linux/390, anyone?)
Sun has been hammered relentlessly for the past 2 years by the tech media. I dare somebody point me to an article with a contrarian view: that Sun will emerge again. But notice they're all saying the same things over and over. In fact, they all seem to be repeating one another.
... CRASH!
When conventional wisdom is 100% in the same direction, it usually ends up wrong. It's like just when everybody thinks the stock market is going up forever and all the amatures hop aboard,
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
WHO CARES? My load balancer automatically detects a dead server and routes requests to another one. Then I go find the dude hardware, pull it out of the rack, and throw it into the garbage. For $4k I can replace it.
By the way, using a larger number of cheap boxes gives me on average better performance and better scalability. The age of Le Grand Box for most business uses is dead.
Apple has moved into a post-Microsoft era with succesful consumer media products. There is absolutely no reason for these firms to merge.
Apple is the opposite of affordable.
Apple sells high-margin overpriced stuff with rich people with more money than tech know-how.
A Sun/Apple alliance would produce an E15K with a burnished green aircraft grade alumninum case.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Sun may be presiding over a declining hardware empire, but it retains an advantage in the growing software market that is based on identity management. Specifically, Sun inherited the Netscape LDAP product line from AOL, which evangelized the commercial adoption of LDAP. Yes, Novell's directory server is a strong competitor, but Sun has the other end of the end-to-end solution: the identity client: Java smart cards and JVMs on mobile phones.
Are there quality gaps in the Sun software stack? Yes. But there are two solid anchors in that stack: licensed JVMs on mobile identity tokens (cards, buttons, passports, phones) and licensed directory (LDAP) servers on the back end. Revenue generation from those two anchors will be sufficient for Sun to (gradually, painfully) upgrade the rest of their stack.
Not to mention OSS Java application evolution, which occurs despite Sun, but which value does eventually accrue to Sun. The academic penetration of Java has seeded a generation of bright ideas to be delivered via OSS Java. Those ideas may yet migrate to C#, but for now, the incumbency advantage goes to Java. If Sun R&D can escape NIH, the best of the OSS ecosystem would find a JCP path into their products.
The reason companies exist is to make money.
Actually, economically speaking, companies exist to maximize profits or, if they are in the hole, to minimize their losses.
Of course it is the intention of companies to make as much money as they possibly can. However, the "grow or die" idea is still misplaced. A company can hold exactly where they are, even dip a little, and have no impact on their employees salaries or benefits.
As long as a company can pay its fixed costs--that is, rent, paychecks, things of that nature--it behoves them to stay in business as long as they can. Turning employees out on the street when you're still making enough money to pay them is hardly right.
Granted, companies can not run in the red forever (although some certainly seem to try) and they may need to look into things like layoffs to return to profitability. I disagree, however, with your mentality that a company needs to perform better than its peers. There is plenty of room for runner-ups in the economy. And while employees would rather work for the company giving them the most money and benefits, that is not always an option. If they're not hiring your position, should you leave the field or find one of their competitors and see if they're hiring?
Capitalism desires that your company perform better than everybody else, but it doesn't require it. If it did, only one company in every field would be worth a damn.
You know what? I'm tired of hearing this FUD. Go look at the Xserves, Xserve Raid array (certified for Windows 2003 Server, Novell and Linux Distros). Look at the new iBooks. They are not overpriced. The G5 workstations are not grossly over priced against other Dual Processor RISC stations. Comparing them with Single CPU (non-SMP capable) machines with crappy integrated GFX is not a fair comparison. If you want to compare, compare them against other MP capable machines like a dual XEON loaded with the same or comparable features as the G5's. I do not want to use a cheap white box, eMachine or Dell for a corporate workstation or gfx workstation. Sheesh.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Your statements are true but irrelevent, since they are apparently attacking your imaginary version of my stace instead of my actual stance. Investing in stocks so that a company can do well (and earn you money) is not a "fanclub". On the other hand, simply trying to buy low and sell high, and not give a ratt's ass what the company actually does, leads to stock market crashes, as you end up buying stocks based on how much you think other people will want those stocks later, not based on what their ownership really represents in the real physical world. An economy based purely on public perceptions like that will fall eventually.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
big iron box mainframes are still sold because clusters of smaller machines don't have the sheer transactional IO that some jobs require. Financial services come to mind. Not much CPU power is required (mainly just some simple math), but when you need to reliably and quickly update millions (or billions) of small independent records, you need serious IO channels to and from memory, a huge disk-buffering system and dedicated hardware to maintaining transaction integrity. All that is better done in a big box where the IO channels are short runs (and in fact, may be all but impossible to do it any other way)
Clustering work well on big CPU intensive jobs that can be parallelized and you're generally doing more CPU work than IO.
-
If I want to grow to a 12 or 16 way machine, from Sun, I have to BUY a 12 or 16 way chassis. Even with 2 or 4 CPUs.
Linux clusters are a great marketing word, but if you have a cluster that can do what my 12 and 16 way Oracle servers can do, let me know.
"Linux CLusters" that I've seen were all MATH clusters.
I expect that the SPARC will die and sun will be offering 4 and 8 way Athlon64 boxes REALLY soon.
Sun has (cray derived) backplane switches (not available on PCs), TREMENDOUS I/O possible. and finally some decent PCI, but even on a lame PCI E4500, I have SEVERAL separate Busses. My 4-way Intel boxes have, er 1 PCI buss. great.
Ever pull a processor board from a running PC? and it kept running?
Me neither.
Now sun's competition on cool features is SGI. Take a gang (32 of, max) 4-way SGI's and join them into a single box. scales a LOT better. But SGI isn't going to kick anyone's ass.
Won't the world be boring when nobody innovates in computers. When "BIOS"s are how people think computers should boot. (and mcneely might eat in a New Deli, but it might be in New Delhi)
And how is this bad?
Would you rather have one fewer alternative to the Windows juggernaut?
The Cult of Mac keeps Apple alive and healthy and I think that's a very cool thing. It's not cheap to be an Apple cultist - I spend at least $3,000 a year on Apple hardware of various kinds - but what I get in return are genuinely great products that deliver excellent value for those who can look past a stiff initial price tag.
You could certainly argue that there is a similar cult built around Linux. There are even some Windows users whose behaviour has distinctly cult-like overtones. Perhaps a consumer cult is formed whenever people have as intimate a relationship with something as people do with their computers.
It might just be a reflection of human behaviour and nothing particularly special. Although there's no question that Steve Jobs is a master showman.
D
I'm certainly no Sun fanboy, but I know they're sitting on a lot of cash and so have some time to figure out what they're going to do. Personally, I'd hate to see Sun disappear, just like seeing Dec go away brought tears to my eyes and I think it is a horrible shame.
I think one of the biggest problems facing us is Intel/PC architecture. A one size fits all solution isn't going to do any one thing exceptionally well, but will be mediocre at everything. I think putting PCs everywhere for everything, is a big mistake. I think certain things need dedicated systems engineered to do those things well. Current trends I see, in my opinion, are to the detriment of the whole human race's progress.
I'd like to see Sun survive, because I'd like to see some diversity in the computing architectures and some choices, you get cheap intel with your choice of windows or linux, or an apple, is all good but I think falls short. I think there is still a place for Sun out there, and I think there has been a lot of people who have sacrificed more than they bargained for in the move to Intel.
In my view it seems like the worst architecture and the worst o/s won the race. I know w/intel isn't all bad and via modularization and volume and dramatically increased speed and reduced costs which is a good thing. I guess we'll never know how it would have been had Amiga/Atari/etc other solutions survived to evolve.
If you remember. Not everyone at DEC lost their jobs. No no reason to fold - someone will buy them.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I'm going to assume the Extra Large 440 here with the following specs
Sun Fire V440 Server
Dell PowerEdge 6600
Total Xeon based savings in our little HORRIBLY INACCURATE study $50,449
However we all know that most people buying Sun software don't care about the price so there is no point anyways.
I think that Sun can bring much valuable technology to Apple, especially the technology, such as a 64-bit clean operating system, that Apple has had trouble implementing. Solaris is one of the more portable commercial Unix variants. The SunOS 5 revision of SunOS was designed explicitly for portability and modernization including the ability to run on 64-bit processors in 64-bit mode. Apple has still not yet done that. With a purchase of Sun, Apple gets a 64-bit clean POSIX-compliant architecture that runs on desktops and servers. Apple finally gets a serious server product and 64-bit bragging rights. And at today's prices Sun is a steal. Plus, Apple finally gets the attention they deserve with Java and have a useful Java environment on both the desktop and server. Finally, Apple can easily move onto whatever 64-bit architecture they desire with impunity given the 64-bit clean nature of Solaris--something, again, the bastardized FreeBSD/Mach that the NeXT developers have been desperately hacking to support today's OSX product, cannot yet do.
Kriston