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"

Comments

What was this article REALLY about?

[eldavojohn]

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.

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 .... And Failed Mergers."

Re:What was this article REALLY about?

[jcr]

People at Apple won't say a thing about it. Those of us who've left Apple, on the other hand...

I am so glad that Apple and Sun didn't do this. Jon Schwartz has done an enormous amount of damage to Sun.

-jcr

more similarities betweeb Apple and Sun

[chriss]

• Both companies were at one time the main producer of Unix workstations (Sun during the 90s, Apple today)
• OpenStep was the result of a collaboration of NeXT and Sun to create an object oriented API based on NeXTSTEP. It ran on NeXTs Mach/BSD OS and Solaris. After the NeXT takeover by Apple in 1996 OpenStep became what today is known as MacOS X, still running on Mach/BSD.
• Styling: Sun and Apple (and NeXT) released workstations in (almost) cubic (Sparcstation IPX, G4 Cube, NeXT Cube) and pizza box format (Sparcstation 20, Mac LC, NeXTstation)
• Their Unix based operating systems are open source
• Both are strong supporters of Java
• Both are based in California
• Both were founded in the context of Stanford university
• Both tried (and failed) to grab a larger peace of the desktop market
• Both were early integrators of network technology into their computers
• Both have been declared dead several times
• Both produced some of the first application servers (WebObjects, J2EE)

Chriss

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Re:Apple could buy Sun

[TheRaven64]

I very much doubt that Steve Jobs has forgiven Sun for the OpenStep debacle. If Sun hadn't developed cold feet, then we would all have had a much nicer development environment for the last decade.

One thing Sun does have which Apple needs is a fast kernel. OS X has a horrible system call overhead (caused largely by Mach port overheads, and by multiple indirection in traps), and is by far the slowest kernel I have had the opportunity to work with. Aqua on top of a Solaris kernel would be close to my ideal system. If Sun had not dumped OpenStep, I would probably be using an OpenStep/Solaris box now instead of a Mac.