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Sun In Talks To Be Acquired By IBM
gandhi_2 writes "Sun Microsystems soared in European trading after a report that it was in talks to be acquired by IBM.
The Wall Street Journal, quoting "people familiar with the matter," reported Wednesday that International Business Machines was in talks to buy the company for at least $6.5 billion in cash, a premium of more than 100 percent over the company's closing share price Tuesday. Officials of Sun and IBM could not immediately be reached for comment."
What would happen to Solaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, etc?
The NetBeans/GlassFish combo is a killer combination for developing Java EE/J2EE applications. I would hate to see those two products disappear, since they compete directly with Eclipse and Websphere from IBM.
Expert Java EE Consulting
Interesting move as I thought IBMs long term strategy was to move away from the hardware market altogether. I wonder what their intentions are with Suns hardware divisions.
He's been unable to stop Sun's decline since he got the job, but if he can sell the carcass for double its current market cap, he's a far better salesman than I've given him credit for.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Sun's suffering, no longer really actively competing with anything. It would be a good thing for them to do and at $6.5B, it should be a no-brainer.
While Sun has finally come around on open source. They still seem to do it with trepidation and even hamper some of their own works. If IBM purchases them, hopefully that will change. I would love to see them take the cuffs off of Java, OpenSolaris, MySQL, and zfs. By cuffs, I mean different things about different projects. (licensing, open up development, etc)
Huge but nowhere near a monopoly.
In smaller territories (Like Jamaica) it's a different matter. Here we have 3 major Enterprise service Companies. One deals mainly in Sun and Dell gear (Fujitsu), Another deals mainly in HP and DELL (MCS) and the 3rd is IBM.
What this buyout would mean is that Fujitsu would no longer have an Enterprise Unix offering and customers who like them (like my current employer) would be screwed.
The really crappy thing is that I don't know anyone who uses SUN gear because of the features, price or service. Every one of them picked a peace of software which is only supported on SUN. So switching to a different Unix/RISK vendor is not really an option.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Netbeans is now easily 10 times better than the bloated corpse that is Eclipse. If this goes through they should kill Eclipse. At the very least they better not kill off NetBeans.
I'm normally against mergers but I think this is one move that actually helps both, where synergies do apply.
This is my sig.
I have long thought that Sun would eventually sell to either IBM or Oracle mostly to get control of Java. Wonder if Oracle is even interested?
Think Deeply.
This will be a nightmare for Java and open source in general.
IBM will kill the following fantastic Sun projects:
Netbeans
Glassfish
They won't kill OpenSolaris/zfs/Dtrace, but they'll probably close source enough of it. Same goes with MySql.
They'll scrap all of Sun's awesome documentation and replace it with their own cryptic documentation. They'll re-engineer Sun's products to generate cryptic error messages, like they do with DB2's wonderful error messages.
IBM makes horrible products. I should know, because my last two companies (including this one) have been IBM shops, and I have to use them every day.
Please God don't let this be true!
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I remember about 9 years ago when IBM bought out Sequent Computer Systems . My employer at the time was a Sequent customer and I knew people who worked at Sequent's corporate office. They were at first all gung ho about joining IBM, but the reality that set in wasn't pretty. As often happens in business, a big company buys a competitor simply to shut the competitor down. Click on the Wikipedia link provided to get some more info on the deal and alternative explanations for the decision to close down Sequent. If I worked for Sun, I wouldn't hold my breath that this would be a good deal for me, but the stock holders and upper management at Sun may come out well from this.
because sun don't want to get infected with GPLitis.
They GPL'd Java, didn't they? The CDDL is similar to the Mozilla, BSD and Apache licenses. Nobody complains about those projects. Why the double-standard when it comes to Sun?
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Except, it was Sun's guys who designed CDDL, and on the DebConf, said they specifically wanted it to be incompatible with GPL. So it's not GPL's fault, it's a conscious decision of Sun's executives.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Where would you take it? If you're intent on sticking with a pure Unix and don't want to have anything to do with Sun or IBM products anymore, it seems like the only alternative is HP-UX on Itanium. I imagine not many would be thrilled at this since, as you pointed out, pretty much the same thing happened when HP and Compaq merged and a lot of DEC's assets were abandoned.
If you've been using Solaris on x64 and don't want to throw out all your hardware, then Linux is probably your only migration path.
"Are there any specific products that Sun sells that IBM doesn't have equivalents of? Sun has some good products" :)
Yes OpenOffice and Java.
Too bad IBM didn't buy Troll Tech as well.
I think IBM still has so anger issues with Microsoft. I could see them really pushing for a Microsoft free stack from top to bottom even if it was FOSS. IBM makes a lot of money from services. A free stack just means more services to sell.
I wonder if they will buy Opera next.
Imagine Solaris, KDE, Openoffice, and Opera all rolled into a nice Free distro
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I think Sun has an open source strategy as a company, while IBM does open source not at the company level but more at the divisional/product level.
It seems to me that MySQL and DB2 are very different products that serve different markets. I would expect IBM to continue both. Possibly move MySQL back toward its "RDBMS Lite" roots, where it is often a good choice when the full power of DB2 is just going to get in the way.
I don't know enough about the other product pairings to comment on them, but perhaps some of the others would dovetail in a similar fashion?
As a current IBMer, mod parent up... IBM is where good products and companies go to die. They have this enormous pool of talented people and excellent products, yet still manage to bury it all under an idiotic, quarterly-results-bottom-line-screw-investment mentality. I've seen small groups in IBM do great things - and then they get noticed, sucked into some larger organization (they're duplicative and we're bigger so we're obviously right!) and any innovation, good ideas, or anything positive at all get swiftly crushed.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Sun's original forte was the personal graphics workstations with bitmap graphics and standard flavor of UNIX. (OK, there was Apollo nad MicroVAXEN too, but hey had lots of non-standard UNIX stuff in them.) The emphasis was "personal". Even though these cost 1/2 to 2/3 an engineer's annual salary at the time, this freed people from the tyranny of the departmental computer. Plus they had turnkey networking, having pioneered many of the newtwork software protocols. Also they one one of the first candidates for the mythical "3M Computer"- one megabyte of memory, one million operations per second, and one mega pixel display. Steve jobs wanted an Apple computer for this slot, but when Apple they balked (four-figure price), he started NeXT.
Sun had a brief renaissance in the 1990s with JAVA (Object-C done right), but it was too little too late.
"Sun has open sourced:"
Sun has open sourced nearly everything they have. Which is why I'm at a loss to understand why IBM is buying them. There's no product Sun makes that has a distinct advantage over an IBM product, nothing Sun has that IBM would really consider an improvement over their products. Solaris over AIX? Eh, that's iffy.
There was a time I thought they'd buy Sun just to own Java, but now that its been open sourced, that reasoning is out the window. I think what IBM is really buying is quite simple: Sun's customer base. That base is fairly loyal, and still significant, and rather than just waiting another decade for Sun to die (and giving rivals a chance at those customers), IBM just decided that it was more practical to buy Sun out now. It's the only thing that makes sense to me. They'll probably integrate a few Sun products into their lineup, but frankly I think a lot of Sun's stuff will just be allowed to wither and disappear... become abandonware.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
What the heck is Oracle waiting for? I truly think it should be Oracle the one buying Sun and not IBM. Oracle and Sun will definitely complement each other.
I'm sure Oracle would love to control MySQL. We know the story there. But for the most part, it would be totally complementary, and would put it in par with its bigger competitors. I would get servers, (finally) a decent IDE, an operating system, and a truckload of technology, like ZFS.
IBM acquiring Sun is not terribly bad, but will Oracle would be better.
IBM figured out how to make money from Java, which is something Sun still hasn't done. IBM in this merger could be perceived as attempting to prevent their huge investment in Java from going down the tubes, in the not-unlikely event of a catastrophic Sun failure, or as preventing acquisition of Sun's Java team by a competitor.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
It seems to be "common geek knowledge" that IBM has this unified corporate animosity to Microsoft -- often blamed on fallout from their split during the OS/2, Windows NT days. This is a seriously naive impression of IBM. It's a giant corporation with entire business units (some probably bigger than Sun) which make enormous sums of money by introducing complexity into the customer environment, and up-selling integration services to "manage" that complexity.
IBM LOVES LOVES LOVES the fact that Windows is a font of unnecessary complexity.
IBM exists as a giant IT behemoth today, precisely because Windows sucks, and they know it. They will do nothing to jeopardize the Windows cash cow.
Even back in that brief window of time when OS/2 could be perceived as a viable alternative, IBM was busily rolling out their internal Windows-based desktop systems infrastructure, in most cases replacing an X-Term infrastructure. OS/2 never even had a chance in the real world, even though it had strong proponents for many years, they were all outside of IBM. Inside of IBM, OS/2 was relegated to a POS terminal system, then trimmed back to an ATM system when the POS systems went Windows.
As recently as a few years ago, when IBM senior managers were betting big on Linux, and bragging publicly about investing a billion dollars a year (and probably more these days) on Linux, IBM customers couldn't even get IBM to submit proposals based on Linux for simple tasks for which Linux was very well suited. IBM instead proposed convoluted, unstable Windows-based "solutions" which cost more. Customers could BEG IBM for Linux based solutions and not get them. IBM actively fought against efforts at their customers to actually use Linux.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You're right about the competing product lines and there are a lot of questions raised by it. However, I don't think it's Solaris/AIX, it's Solaris/Linux ... AIX is still alive and kicking, but inside IBM there is a lot of movement and development on Linux. AIX is receiving incremental updates for newer POWER machines, but nothing new. For example, there isn't an AIX port for the Cell architecture, but running Linux on Cell was a given from day one.
That said, I don't think there's a question of which OS would win in an IBM buyout of Sun... Linux trounces Solaris because IBM has put millions of dollars into Linux for truly first class support of POWER, getting the kernel to support all of the nice features like hotplug memory add / remove and other really neat hardware support. Solaris would have to be ported to POWER from scratch and, in turn, have millions spent on it just to get it up to par with Linux which doesn't make any sense. And even with cool features that Linux doesn't do (ahem, DTrace), it would take far less effort to just update and improve existing Linux based tools (SystemTap) or develop a new tool from scratch, rather than dumping money into the OS just to get them.
This makes a lot of sense: Sun is mostly about Java these days, but they haven't figured out hot to monetize Java. IBM, on the other hand, is making quite a bit of money with Java.
Sun has been running Java into the ground slowly. Hopefully, IBM can put Java on the right track again: fully open source it, fix its performance problems, provide better native interfaces, provide better integration with Linux, enable interoperability with Mono/.NET, etc.
Perhaps, but I think that IBM would be getting one hell of a sweet deal
I don't think so. Sun's core server and OS business is in deep trouble, and Java is under threat as well.
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Solaris and Linux are hopeless as far as providing a windows alternative. As far as a realistic alternative to Windows, Linux wouldnt know how to do it if it hit them in the head. For Linux to really be a viable Windows alternative it is vital that it makes it easy for binary only drivers and apps to be made for Linux and to provide stable driver ABIs. Linux has to stop being so arrogant in assuming everything they use will come with a distro, and realise that real users will want to use third party software and drivers. They also have to assume that a user may want to choose between using different drivers and will need to be easily be able to choose a manufacturer supplied driver. basically the user has to be able to throw in a disc, click install and have the hardware or software work. Gnome meanwhile have entirely the wrong idea about what makes software useable. I dont know where they got the idea that making software rigid, inflexible and feature sparse makes it more useable, but it doesnt. Gnome is an inflexible memory hogging disaster that has only gotten worse. The idea of good design is to make software configurable and flexible as possible, but place lesser used features in advanced screens. useability is all in layout, not in number of features. Software should work out of the box with reasonable defaults with no configuration but user should be able to fine tune them if they wish. This allows users as little or as much control as they need and allows them to grow into the software.
It was too busy "competing" with MS to focus on it's core market - high performance computers.
Sun did waste a lot of effort on desktop initiatives. (Still does.) But that's never dominated management's attention. It's just what got the most press, because the issues of hardware manufacturing and sales don't make good copy.
(Right now, I'm working on a system that's in the process of being upgraded from Hypertransport 1 to Hypertransport 3. Doesn't that send chills up and down your spine? No?)
The problem is not that management didn't pay attention to the hardware business — they paid plenty. The problem is that they kept selling to the 1998 marketplace long after the game changed. In 1998, there was so much demand for computers, and people were so unpicky about costs, Sun could sell expensive systems just by boasting how powerful they were. Then the dotcom bubble burst, and people either went out of business or survived by looking for ways to do business cheaper. And a big way to cut costs is to switch from proprietary architectures (SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC) to the commodified x86.
Took Sun a long time to come to terms with that. When the bubble burst, the party line at Sun was that it was a temporary downturn and they could just ride it out. Well, the downtown was indeed temporary, but the customers never came back. They wanted commodity systems, and Sun was only working on SPARC systems. Yes, they had acquired Cobalt, but the SPARC-uber-alles mindset at Sun soon drove the Cobalt people away and destroyed a product line Sun had spent $2 billion acquiring. When they finally admitted to themselves that they had to change with the marketplace (and there are lots of Sun people who still haven't drunk that koolaid) they had to build up the business all over again, partly by outsourcing design, partly by buying up yet another x86 company. Ironically, that company was founded by Sun co-founder Andy Bectholsheim, who had left Sun partly because of this very issue.
So, despite the attention it got in the press, the Sun-MS feud was just a sideshow. What really hurt was their inability to adapt.