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Sun and Apple Could Have Merged
Firmafest writes "The Register is running a story about Sun and Apple almost merging on three separate occasions. The information was revealed at a Computer History Museum event, where Sun's four co-founders spoke about the history of the Sun company. Bill Joy said that the two comp anies almost teamed on three different projects, including sharing a user interface and the SPARC architecture." From the article: "'As far as I know we also almost bought Apple once,' Joy said. 'We almost merged with Apple two other times.' Many Silicon Valley observers have long seen links between Sun and Apple. Both companies make slick, pricey hardware and are counter-punchers in their respective markets. They also have charismatic CEO figures and strong anti-Microsoft streaks"
So Apple and Sun almost merged ... however, the way the article is written makes it sound as though we're only concerned with one thing--iPods.
.... And Failed Mergers."
Is this the only product that Apple makes? I thought they also made fairly nice laptops.
Yes, I know iPods are the hot thing right now, but did it talk about any of Sun's products?
McNealy has an iPod, McNealy says iPods will be as archaic as answering machines one day, McNealy seems to think that all Apple has are iPods.
My god, they weren't merging their mp3 players, they were talking about merging architectures and file systems.
Is McNealy really so shallow to as to say, "I bought your media player and it's pretty good but it's going to be obsolete someday and that's why we won't merge."?
This is the computer science industry, everything becomes obsolete! Apple is not losing money on iPods and they have other technologies to rely on.
What do iPods and their long term reliability have to do with a merger!?
Perhaps this article should have been titled "McNealy Speaks Out About the Mediocre iPod
My work here is dung.
Sapple?
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
When an apple falls form the tree and is left in the sun for a time, the apple rots. I suspect that the cojoined company might have been refered to, if only by the users, a rotten apple.
Snapple
I'm puzzled.
Chriss
--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
I'll say it one more time, and make sure you pay attention:
Dollar for dollar, Apple hardware is a bargain. It's not "pricey"... calling something pricey implies it costs more than it's worth. Apple hardware is worth every penny, and I'd say you'd have a really difficult time building comparable equipment for significantly less cost. And when I say comparable, I mean comparable. For example, you can't compare XServe RAID to the cheapass RAID card and 10 drives you coddled together from crap you bought at ComputersRNeat.com.
Apple was founded on being a personal computer maker. It was founded to put control of the machines into the users hands. Yes, networked computers aren't mainframes, but McNealy seems to have thes attitude that computing should be centrally controlled or stored.
"Slick" describes Apple perfectly, but isn't a word I'd use to talk about Sun stuff. Sun's hardware is pricey but not because of its looks. It's because it's built like a tank. Apple is all about style, Sun is about rock solid workhorse machines. I think they're both better off as separate companies.
I am trolling
Is it just me? I'm seeing all sorts of weird layout problems.
A niagra ipod or ipod sparc or .....
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
"They also have charismatic CEO figures and strong anti-Microsoft streaks""
Linus and Open Source.
They also have charismatic CEO figures and strong anti-Microsoft streaks Another common factor: Both CEOs have known Reality Distortion Fields. Could two such personalities coexist? I'm reminded of what happened between Jobs and John Sculley.
I always tthought that Apple was all about form, making it look good. Sun always seemed to be about functionality. Although it looks like a good combination, Apple is Apple, and I'd buy an Apple product for the prestige value. Which is why I own an Apple iPod nano, rather than I own another product - it looks good. All about style.
An Apple-Sun merger could have been good or terrible.
We could have had OS X on Sun hardware for years by now.
We could have had OS X based on Solaris.
Which is a bug and which is a feature is left as an exercise for the reader.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I don't really agree with the reason (networking), but I do agree that eventually the iPod is going to lose some steam. Presumably they have a few things in the pipeline to potentially be "the next thing", the leading contender being a move into the living room. My guess is the same as everyone else's: a device to allow you to use Front Row on your own TV, receiving data wirelessly from your desktop Mac. (A followup to the Airport Express.)
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
Far be it from me to be in the minority, but I bet the combination would work out just fine. Imagine Sun workstations with actual style and imagine Apple on a network scale. They might be polar opposities as far as technological bent goes but that's what makes the merger such a sweet idea, for they would be complementary. As opposed to say the HP (fairly good company) and Compaq (black hole company) merger, which really doesn't seem to have borne much fruit and sent Carly Fiorina to her tropical island hideaway a bit earlier than she might have wanted.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I want my iSPARC and iFire.
Mmmm, laptop with Sun chips....*drool*
You say you want a revolution....
I do remember the dark days of '97 when Apple was practically begging to be bought out by Sun. Fortunately, then-CEO Michael Spindler faded away shortly afterward.
The business models of both companies were wildly different, and to some extent still are. But now, I wonder if AAPL should snatch up SUNW for a song.
Apple wants to be a server company too, but can't quite crack the market, even though they have solid server hardware and a decent server OS. The only thing keeping Sun afloat today is their user base as a server manufacturer. So far, sounds like a match. And Sun shareholders would get a more refined CEO in the bargain once McNealy bolted.
The biggest challenge though, is probably insurmountable, and that's product line integration. Sun may be gasping, but Solaris still has a strong presence out there. I can't imagine a forced migration to OS X Server would please sysadmins, even if they get to keep their SPARC-based servers. Which server hardware and OS would "Snapple" sell? Would SPARC and Solaris be end-of-life'd in such a scenario?
So.. I'm not sure. If Sun is in serious trouble, Apple might have a case for rescuing a captive market. But ithe size of Sun's customer base would have to justify the hurdles involved in integrating the acquisition.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
I honestly don't think a merger would have worked before with Apple's previous CEOs who basically sucked pretty bad. Apple would have just stopped being "Apple."
Maybe now with Steve Jobs and a healthy Apple brand it could work and Apple could use some of Sun's technology and strengths for something interesting. But not prior to Steve Jobs joining, he steered the company back to good health.
I also think an Apple transition to x86 wouldn't have worked before Jobs for similar reasons. Under previous management at Apple, I can imagine Apple transitioning to x86, and then asking itself why they bother making a different operating system for their hardware, and abandoning MacOS entirely. The previous Apple CEOs were really dragging Apple down and almost killed it.
Computers should not be in the hands of users, nor on their desktops. Ever.
A terminal is all any user needs, or should have. Sure we are talking fancy quick graphical termnals and not VT100s, but a terminal just the same.
Giving the first average user his own computer was the worst day in IT history.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Low End Mac has more information about the Apple/Sun dealings here (yes, I'm well aware that this article was featured on /. a few weeks back) and here.
Yes, Apple has such an anti-Microsoft streak that they force a Microsoft employee to share the stage with Steve Jobs at his MacWorld keynotes so they experience the reality distortion field before demoing their latest version of Microsoft Office for Mac. To further show Apple's contempt for Microsoft, Jobs just released an iMac that will be able to boot Windows Vista.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
it sounded like they are at their 10 year high school reunion, bragging about all of the girls that they COULD of laid. anyways I have always thought sun and apple were made for each other - sun for the backend and mac for the client....once I get a mac intel gonna dual boot it with osx and solaris. -QAK
Looking at the numbers, that would be more logical. So lets ask Steve Jobs what he thinks about those Sparc, err intel, err amd, err sparc only, err intel again, err no x86 solaris anymore, err free x86 solaris, err opensource, err linux is evil, err linux support department(?) company which is loosing money. Sun just does not have any news from themselves anymore which can do anything in the market, so for the mean time, lets gossip about the popular kid on the block: Apple.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
way back when Sun's market cap (now about 11 B) was bigger than Apple's (now about 72B), just two years ago the market caps were about the same
Hey Apple how's it going?
<Apple> Go away loser.
<Sun> Come on, you know you wanted to hook up with me
<Apple> Yea, whatever *puts hand up*
<Sun> You know we could have killed Intel with Sparc
<Apple> Uh huh, haven't you been paying attention? I *LOVE* Intel now
<Sun> *whine* don't be like that, I ALMOST BOUGHT YOU
<Apple> Uh huh, all talk, no action
<Sun> HEY EVERYONE, I KNEW THIS BITCH BACK WHEN SHE WAS A THREE DOLLAR WHORE, SHE'S MINE STILL
<Apple> Someone call security and get this loser out of here
* Security runs in and grabs Sun by the shoulders *
<Security> Sorry, private party, you're not on the list, you're gonna have to leave
<Sun> Get your hands off of me
* Sun storms out *
<Java> Sun baby, come on over my place
<Sun> Oh gawd, not you again, you're looking pretty beat up baby, every time I talk you up I look like an idiot
back in the mid 90's when SGI was riding high and Apple was fading into the sunset.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Back when the first rumor about Sun and Apple merging in 1996 I "blogged" a parody of a Snapple lable on JokeWallpaper.com called "Sunapple Crazy Computer Cooler"
As a general comment - I'm not sure how I feel about the two companies merging. Yes they are similar in some ways - but they both have their own distinct "feels". I have a feeling that the company that was left after a merge would have ended up as a watered down mix of both that would ultimately fail.
:) Only that I enjoyed coding client server apps better than I currently enjoy coding web applications. Every once in awhile I get to code a daemon or something that still runs as its own process and every time I'm thrilled to not have to deal with all the overhead crap/marketspeak that comes with coding webapps.
:) The thing that really bugs me about the quote above is that it implies that no one will actually OWN their own music anymore. Everything will be provided (metaphorically) to you from Sony's servers. When you miss a payment (for whatever reason), your music collection goes away until you pay again. That is NOT a system that I want to deal with.
Now on to this crap:
"There's a pendulum thing where stuff is on the client side and then goes back into the network where it belongs," McNealy said. "The answering machine put voicemail by the desk, and then it went back into the network." "Your iPod is like your home answering machine," McNealy said. "I guarantee you it will be hard to sell an iPod five or seven years from now when every cell phone can access your entire music library wherever you are."
I've never like the whole network idea. I was happier coding back in the days of client/server architecture. Please keep in mind that I have no technical merit for my argument
I keep diverging from my ultimate point
Now that Apple is switching to Intel hardware we will know the truth. I think we will see similar hardware in apple and non-apple platforms, and we will see the prices, and truth will be told.
Personally I believe people who buy into Apple pay a premium for their hardware and their OS. It is simple economics - smaller market share, they have to make a higher yield per machine to make enough money to stay afloat, whereas Microsoft/Dell/*insert notebook manufacturer here* can stay afloat on much thinner margins by sheer volume.
Well the point is they didn't merge (and nor did Apple and IBM), so what else is new.
This sound more like some kind of hopeless, unrequited longing for a beautiful girl. Apple has style and pizzaz and Sun doesn't, but oh how Sun longs for them! The chairman of Sun recently spoke of having an "iPod moment" around something or other, probably a new line of servers or piece of software. It wasn't, but I think we can guess where he was coming from.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
"Bill Joy said that the two comp anies almost teamed on three different projects, including sharing a user interface and the SPARC architecture."
Haha, I get it! *duck*
You mean like this?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I remember not all that long ago schwartz suggesting in an open letter just that. I thought it was just wishful thinking/postering, but maybe he really meant it. Got to admit, it would be an interesting merger of technologies.
I think that the new Niagra based systems are a pretty good talking point.
Not to mention the particulalry nice opteron systems that sun are churning out now.
Sun buying out Apple or Sun merging into Apple?
In either case, I think that would have spelled disaster for these companies.
Apple doesn't have the mindset to enter the server market. Apple's server offerings have been novel toys in the industry, but few would agree that Apple has truely offered any server product worth its salt. Having Apple absorb Sparc and Solaris server technologies probably would have killed off those Sun products.
Sun would have destroyed Apple's innovation and creativity. Sun spent the better part of the 90's innovating through litegation, bringing MS to court as a way to try and compete with the behemoth rather then creating any good and innovative product to fight against MS. Sun stagnated developing the Sparc and Solaris lines as they dumped money trying to sue MS for anti-competitive business practices. Java suffered for about 5 years because of this, instead of improving the technology, Sun simply crippled it on the world's most dominant platform. Sun's current method of innovation is to create OEM PC Linux desktops and tweak a Linux distro to be more Java friendly.
Would Sun want to enter the consumer electronic's market? Would Solaris technologies enter OSX? Apple would not have embraced Linux the way Sun has. Apple wouldn't embrace Open Source the way Sun did. Open Office probably would have been turned into AppleWorks for retail sale. I can't see two more different companies in terms of overall motivation coming together.
The only thing that is common with the two companies is that they are fledglings trying to gain marketshare against Wintel. But any form of a SNAPPLE company would have failed because of just too many difference of opinions. In fighting between execs from both companies probably would have thrown the resulting company into chaos. Both Sun and Apple have STRONG opinions about their relative companies, I doubt Steve Jobs would have handed over much control to Scott McNealy, and vice versa.
The bottom line is, has Sun and Apple ever partnered or cooperated on ANYTHING?
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
As a mac/unix geek from the 80's, I thought nothing would be cooler than merging sun and apple duing the mid-late 90's when these rumors cropped up. Apple was struggling and unable to find a suitable replacement for MacOS "classic". How cool would it have been to Appleize Solaris with Mac UI on top and solaris underpants! That was then.... High flying sun stock from those days is now worth about 10% of what it was. Sun is clinging to life in a dying market and Apple is now one of the biggest unix vendors on the planet. The iPod is on the verge off turning apple's declining computer business around.
Now Sun has nothing to offer Apple other than brand recognition which really dosent count for much in a market with computer proffesionals influencing purchasing decisions. People buy Sun for Solaris and Mac's for OSX. Replacing either one with the other would kill the product. Sun's developers would balk at having to port their software to a new OS with no guarantee of its success or longevity. About the only thing Sun could offer is expertise in the server business, which Apple could get much more cheaply simply by hiring the right people. Besides, the server market is far different than it was in 1997 and if Apple wants to be successul they need new ideas, not old ones from a dying age.
Apple could buy up Sun and attempt to "fix" its existing business, but the stuff that Apple is good at, aint the stuff Sun needs. As for what might have been... Knowing what we know now and how good Jobs and OSX have been for Apple.... I am not getting a pretty picture from an Amelio/McNealy Apple/Sun.
"There's a pendulum thing where stuff is on the client side and then goes back into the network where it belongs," McNealy said. "The answering machine put voicemail by the desk, and then it went back into the network." While I do understandthe pendulum analogy, I think the answering machine is a terrible example. When I get home and want my messages I want the ease of hitting a button, pushing forward button to go to the next message, erase button to get rid of it etc. I don't want to have to pick up my phone, hold it to my ear, take the phone away from my ear to push 7 for next message or 76 to backup or 84 to delete or whatever combination needed to navigate. I have this service on my phone right now. I finally convinced some tech at the phone company I DIDN'T want this crappy service. I only have it cause the bundle I buy has it and its still cheaper than buying unbundled. The way the tech fixed the problem is he set my answering option to answer after 99 rings or something. I really hated picking up the phone and hearing the stutter dial tone saying I had a message and I knew I was never going in that system to get it. I hate to sound like an apple commercial but I just want shit to work. My life is complicated enought without dealing with the remote answering machine.
Apples need Sun to grow.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Okay, I added the last three.
Anyway, this ain't new and it aint news.
They always seemed to look so similar in style. Wonder what sort of company could have come out of merging sun and apple.
Has this writer ever seen Scott McNealy, much less heard him speak?
Yes, we all know about how later versions of NEXTSTEP (then OpenStep) ran on SPARC, but how many people remember Apple's "Macintosh Application Environment"?
f lash.950314.13593.html9 6/swol-12-mae.html
This was a complete Mac emulation environment that ran on Solaris/SPARC and HP-UX in the mid '90s. It only ever emulated a 68LC040, so by the time it was discontinued in 1998, nobody cared. It is an interesting nexus, though, between Apple and Sun (and HP, where Woz first met Jobs).
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/1995-03/sun
http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-12-19
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I think Sun and Apple merging would have been a horrible idea; the corporate cultures of the two companies are completely different. And instead of getting the best of both worlds, you probably would have ended up with products giving you the worst.
When I was at Prime in the early 80's, there was talk about acquiring a little company on the West Coast that was making pizza-box computers. The software people were mostly in favor, seeing the machines as being a good platform for Primos (sometimes described in those days as "Multics in a matchbox"). The hardware people were opposed, however, and they eventually prevailed. PR1ME itself failed to prevail; I've always blamed the stupid way they spelled their name.
Sun and Apple almost merged. Until they realized that the resultant name, Sunapple, might turn people off of their products.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Java? Well I still have a bit of hatred left about applets and it would be nice if you could get it to be a bit less of a memory hog in gui mode BUT I suppose it is nice that some apps I use can run almost anywhere. Provided that I got more memory then god but lets not be mean.
The networked thin client idea? GIVE IT A GODDAMN FUCKING REST ALREADY! WE ARE NOT INTRESTED
Sun director really is a fucking idiot based on this article alone.
Parent already put in the quote but fails to take it apart all the stupidity in it. First of he talks about 5-7 years into the future. HELLO! BIG FUCKING WAKE UP CALL FOR SUN!!! If 5 -7 years ago you would have told Sun they would sell AMD machine and Apple would be on Intel and Sony would have lost the walkman to some tiny PC company everyone would have called you insane. The iPod has been around for what 5 yrs and sold 45 million units. AT a very nice profit according to everyones claims. Another 5-7 years of this succes and Steve Jobs will get blow jobs from his bankers virgin daughters (or sons with mac users you can never tell).
Second is that we will be getting our music via our cellphones. Another wake up call is in order. Combination hardware will never replace specialised hardware. It may margenilize it (type writers do still exist) but never replace it because the specialist hardware can always afford to be better. Big fucking clue? That you can still buy old fashioned dedicated Hi-Fi equipment that does just one thing. Other big fucking clue? That the iPod gets away with not being a radio and voice recorder. We had this all-in-one approach with tape walkmans for a while but dedicated devices never went away.
Last is the idea that we will replace local storage with networked storage. Oh yeah. Perhaps sun directors are rolling in it but for the rest of us we got to watch our phone bills. The phone companies LOVE to charge us per fucking megabyte. A good song comes in at easily 3-4 mb (that is presuming that in 5-7 we will not need bigger files just as we now got bigger video files) and listening to an half hour of them will cost a small fortune.
Ah but in 5-7 years we will have some super fast wireless network and very cheap prices. If you believe that, well buy some Sun stock.
Oh sure it might happen. gmail is perhaps one of the first real working examples of an application moving to the network and off your pc. Of course for as long as google continues to exist.
But lets examine how this would run for music. First off a music collection can easily run at 20gb. That is a bit more then the 1gb mail google promises. Second google does not promise your email is secure. It had better make sure only I can access my music or the RIAA will do a nutter.
Then you got to have a music player that can be attached cheaply to the network (less then a dollar per day and even that will men 30 dollars per month to listen to your already bought music), with constant datastream at high bitrates. Yah. Not going to happen. Why not? How is gmail financed? Because I see ads. You want google to insert ads between your already paid for music?
Sun makes some nice hardware and software but somebody should buy the development divisions and replace the directors with people with a clue. Merging would a be a nice idea. Apple design and development with apple leadership. That could work. Sun leadership, well isn't MS looking for some people to replace the ones running away to google?
Btw, anyone know if work has been started on getting ZFS into linux?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
You will never bag a supermodel with a cheapass RAID card and 10 drives you coddled together from crap you bought at ComputersRNeat.com. And sometimes it's good to just have nice stuff around the house.
Cheap RAID sucks. The X Serve is actually reasonably priced, $3 to $5 per GB, a little higher then SCSI-attached Dell stuff (Which can be garbage. You've been warned.), a little less than IBM or Sun, FC or iSCSI based in the $6 to $7/GB range. You get what you pay for, basically.
I'm not a bigot - I have to buy 10 TB of disk in the next year and Apple is one the list.
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?"
and has been spiralling Sun turd style down the toilet for years. The company has a decreasing number of products that actually generate money because McNealy believes that his enemy is still Microsoft and the best way to defeat Microsoft is to give products away for free. I honestly think he needs to evaluate his business model for both software and hardware while Sun still has cash reserves and brands that the market cares about because he is pissing away a lot of goodwill with his ludicrous 'unique selling proposition'.
Giving the first average user his own computer was the worst day in IT history.
Amen to that.
Anyone (me) who's had to administer 700 desktops in a city govt organization knows exactly where you're coming from. The worst part is when upper management orders us to circumvent fundamental security practices to make something more convenient for some exceptionally stupid end-users to be able to download and execute anything they please off the Internet, and then when the infections run rampant, we get the full blame and are accused of allowing the problem to have happened as if it were our (IT's) idea to have made the systems more vulnerable.
Ironic how I took a break from playing Go on Hikarunix just to come in here and read this article. Yes, join two lesser groups to make a stonger main group against a common stronger enemy! Joseki!!!
I don't hear him saying that. Sure, I want to keep stuff on my laptop so it's available when I'm offline. But I might also want it networked when I'm at home. Networking doesn't imply central control at all -- just look at the Web.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
Now if they would have spelled it PR1M3 instead that would've made all the difference in the world, and they would have undoubtedly still been prospering gloriously today!
And have Sun RUIN Apple like they've burried themselves? Hell no!
Apple can't handle the Enterprise but they could buy access and customer base. Let Sun continue as is but chop off their lower end and put the Aqua interface ontop of the Solaris kernel. Apple could then work on migrating SunRay technology into something for the home user. Even more basic than AOL. Just plug the box into the wall and they are up and running. That way we all won't have to do tech support for our parents and grandparents anymore. It'll all happen on the backend.
I say this because back in the day, I worked at a well-known national space agency which shall remain nameless, using a variety of Unix boxes. NeXTStep was by far the best desktop I'd ever seen, and until OS X came out, nothing else had ever come close. I'm not sure what would have happened if Sun and Apple had merged, but I doubt the UI on a Mac would be any better.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
The day users got personal computers was actually the day productivity increased, bureaucracy decreased and IT managers lost power. Usually the people who say this kind of thing don't care much about the first, are ambivalent about the second and really hate the third.
BTW: Apple's real success was when "users" started putting Apple ][ personal computers on their desks despite "Central IT" guidelines requiring all "computer purchases" to be cleared (usually a process where the IBM sales rep went out with the CEO for a round of golf and told him what the IT should be told to buy that quarter). "Users" got around it by calling the Apple ][ an "advanced desktop calculator".
'I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.'
- Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of the C++ programming language
It's a logical idea at some point I guess, but why would
... Sun has nothing of value anymore
Apple which is successful, has a positive culture, and a
great financial upside, anything to do with Sun which is
circling the drain and whose culture is dead, and who stock
cannot even hit $5 over the last 5 years now?
Apple could perhaps leverage Sun's upper end hardware, but
the chances of anyone pulling that off with what is going on
at Sun are pretty low
but their past and their name.
Apple on the other hand has returned from the grave, and
really taken off because they are consumer oriented.
Scott McNealy is a loser who will milk Sun dry while
flushing it down the toilet, if he cannot have it, no one
will.
Well, ya see, we have to think about the new name that a Sun-Apple merger would create. In their effort to end litigation with the Apple records (the record company for the Beatles), Apple and Sun have agreed to infringe on a less potent copyright: enter Snapple Computer.
Actually Jobs and SGI have a common link in Pixar (which, IIRC, was a big customer of SGI). Your right, they would have been a good match.
Scott M. couldn't have shared power with Steve J. Hell would freeze over first. Imagine the conference room discussions!
Steve: Check this out! Its stunning! It looks great, it works great. Its fast and reliable and it does something nobody else can figure out how to make money with.
Scott: Cool! Lets give it away to piss off microsoft!
Steve: No no, we can SELL this. We can make money on it.
Scott: Yeah, but how does that help our primary goal?
Steve: It does, I just said it would be profitable.
Scott: So what? It doesn't hurt Microsoft! Forget it. Give it away so nobody else can make money with the same kind of thing. In the long run we'll win because we'll hurt Bill.
****** End of merger plan *******
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
What the hell is Snaple, then?
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Well the most recent Apple hardware I've had a chance to use on a regular basis is a ~1GHz G4 tower so I can't really say too much in the way of firsthand long term performance comparison, but from my limited use of the dual 2.2 GHz G5 workstations we were getting in at work for the art types, I'm not all that impressed by the price/performance ratio of their systems as a whole. We were spending roughly $3600 per box for Dual G5s, 1GB PC3200, 100GB SATA HD, SuperDrive, 128 MB ATi card, flashy see-thru KB and eliptical buttonless hockey puck, no monitor, and AppleCare. These seemed about equivalent to the $1750 Dell Optiplex I've got at my desk (P4 3GHz HT, 1GB PC3200 160GB SATA HDD, 256 MB NVidia card, DL DVD-RW, came with a cheap 17" CRT, KB, and optical mouse) for everyday type tasks (email, word processing, media file playback, light Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign work etc.). The Apples just basically looked better, weighed about 5x as much, and costed twice as much in my limited evaluation. I'm pretty the Dual G5s would handily own the Dell with any serious number crunching, but for your average user (even your average Art Dept. user) I really didn't see much a difference.
The ultimate in price to performance in my book is still only available to those experienced or adventurous enough to build their own at this point. I built my new machine for home about a month ago and for $100 less than the dual G5 workstations I could swing an Asus A8N SLI Deluxe w/ an AMD 64 4400+ (dual Toledo 2.2GHz cores w/ 1MB L2 cache per core), 2GB PC3200, 3 75 GB WD Raptor SATA HDD in RAID5, 2 NVidia 7800GTX 256MB cards, DL DVD-RW, DVD Reader, a very nice case (Lian Li PC-60B Plus), new high end MS KB and Mouse, and a Dell FPW-2005. No other personal computer I've used could touch this machine in terms of real world performance and the system has thus far been a good deal more stable under WinXP and Fedora Core 4 than my Optiplex at work (in fact the only issues I've run into so far have been in games w/ buggy SLi support that could be resolved by simply running the game on one card). 1680 x 1050 Gaming w/ all the eye candy, Multitrack audio/MIDI sequencing, 3D modeling/animation and rendering, whatever I throw at it, it handles w/o batting an eye. I'm on my own for support/RMA of any defects that may arise, but I usually only use support contracts as a last ditch attempt at fixing a problem anyways.
Might have been a good idea, then on top of that they should have grabbed VIA, then they could have had all the normal bases covered, small low watt tech for various mobile computing, mid range consumer and office hardware of the best quality, then larger enterprise class machines. Not saying it's a perfect idea, but it might have worked. Heck, SGI is sitting there right now, there has got to be some salvageable tech and good people there as well.
Sony has been fading recently, seeming to lose touch with the young consuer, but I have always thought that they would be a good fit with Apple. They are consumer based companies, not corporate based companies.
Sun would have been a better fit had Apple been interested in going corporate - like a hip IBM. Sun could run the server side of the business and Apple the desktop. But that was not what Jobs was interested in.
Sony has always been the odd man out in Japan as they have always been real innovators, not followers and perfecters of other company's visions.
Sony has a great entertainment business too, which fits well with the Apple and the Personal video market.
At this point though with Apple riding so high they would likely say "who needs Sony?" They might be right.
with the most beautiful interfaces no one can use as every normal person gets stuck in the installation screen... The consumer spending hundreds to pay the trained technician to kind fix it... Yeah, I wonder why they didn't merge...
and stop trying to steal ZFS for linux. Go out an actually innovate something on your own for once instead of jsut copying the efforts of others. Pretend that you actually had an *idea* rather than stealing somebody else's hard work for your own benefit.
A merger or buyout between SUN and Apple would end up like HP/Compaq. I think a better fit would be a merger between SUN and AMD. AMD has always wanted into the server market. Sun would have more chip fabs and engineers for the Sparc line. And the two of them together would have the IP for three major processor architectures, Alpha being the 3rd chip.
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Sign my petition to get a native Flash player for FreeBSD!
I think you meant the University of California at Berkeley, which is Stanford University's football rival across the San Francisco Bay.
Apple was co-founded by "Berkeley Blue", aka Steve Wozniak. "Berkeley Blue" was his nickname when he was an undergraduate at Berkeley, walking up and down the dorm rooms with (unenrolled) buddy Steve Jobs trying to sell their "blue boxes" to other students. Blue boxes were telephone devices that would allow students to make free phone calls, by using the sound frequencies unveiled by phone phreaker Cap'n Crunch. Wozniak stopped out of Berkeley to create Apple Computer, then re-enrolled in Berkeley, graduating with his bachelor's degree in 1987.
Sun's "open source" operating system that you speak of was written (or adapted) by Sun Microsystem co-founder Bill Joy, who had worked on BSD Unix while a graduate student at Berkeley. BSD is an acronynm that means "Berkeley Software Distribution". In fact, two other UC Berkeley undergraduates working alongside Joy, William Jolitz and Lynne Greer, also developed 386BSD (that is, BSD for Intel CPUs), from which is descended the Darwin Operating System used by Apple's Mac machines today.
My office mate at the next desk has been complaining about her new Windows laptop, which "feels cheap" and is "way too slow", yet on paper it out-specs my older PowerBook by a fair margin. So "niceness" in the sense that the GP meant has little to do with raw CPU specs. The tactile sense of speed has more to do with video processing, memory, disk speed, and UI/OS than CPU speed, which generally only gets noticed on things like photoshop filters and video processing. And then, of course, there is the tactile sense of quality, which no amount of horsepower will help with. Good CPU speed can still give you a sucky computer, as my office mate will attest. Although to be fair, a nice computer with a fast CPU is a wonderful thing.
if they had merged, MacOS would be a lot snappier!
I've seen such comparisons over and over in this forum, and the Macs almost always come out on top for overall value. When you include all the hardware specs the prices are close; Macs are perhaps a couple hundred more. That's putting quality issues aside -- just put a cheap 20" LCD monitor next to the one that comes standard on the iMac and tell me you're getting the same deal. You're not. Then add in the software and the price difference is negligible if it exists at all. That's TCO aside -- Macs are not just prettier than their Wintel counterparts; they are made to last longer and break less. An Apple laptop will take a lot more abuse than a cheap windows laptop. When Jobs announced the intel iMacs someone posted this same ridiculous comment and was proven wrong with actual hardware comparisons. I'm sure you will say such things add "false value" but that's ludicrous; what is false about having to buy a new computer in 2 years? What is false about not having to pay for OS X (even assuming you could run it on your windows machine, which you eventually will be able to)? What is false about getting a better monitor?
The good stuff is inside.....
Solaris on Mac hardware. Mac interface on Solaris. Proprietary, inaccessible, AND batcave insane fanaticism.
Better would have been Sun, Netscape, and Oracle which would have covered all the bases Microsoft did under one roof but can you imagine Ellison, McNealy, and Andreessen NOT killing each other? I can't even imagine the last two fitting into the same boardroom as Ellison's ego.
In the end it was probably better for everyone everywhere that no such thing happened. Certainly it turned out better for Open Source to have Microsoft remain pre-eminent in the proprietary world over incompetent foes who couldn't shoot straight thus leaving Microsoft as the sole boogeyman to target by the movement making a really clear if not entirely credible on deeper examination comparison between closed source and open.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Here are the two sides of this.
A. Macs are no more expensive than similarly equipped computers from PC quality brands.
B. There are no cheap macs built to less stringent quality and feature standards, while the PC world overflows with these things.
I know it's confusing, but the fact is that both statements are true at the same time in this world.
giant burning fruit... then cafe apple java... solaris + OS X interface - giant dead star (solar + aqua theme)
cuz its got the snappy
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I wonder if AAPL should snatch up SUNW for a song.
Hell with that. Apple should buy out SGI for a line of a song aqnd roll some of that monstrous multiprocessor goodness into OS X. Screw Big Mac, I want a 512-proc single-system XServe! Seriously though, with what SGI could be had for these days, I don't see why not.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
and iPods would be really, really ugly.