Microsoft to buy Sun?
After reading this article, I’m inclined to agree with the idea that “someone will buy Sun”. However I don’t agree with the author about who will buy them.
Fujitsu and Sun work together on the hardware side (SPARC chips), but I don’t quite see why Fujitsu bothers TBH - as far as I’m concerned, Solaris is a dying operating system. Due to brainshare more than anything, Linux _will_ beat it. It’s also IMHO not as robust or mature as AIX or HP-UX for the really big box stuff.
If HP or IBM buys Sun then they have to figure how to support _another_ Unix (in addition to their own + Linux). Look at what happened to Alpha customers after HP bought Digital for what a mess that makes of your roadmap. I just don’t see what’s left as valuable to them.
I think Microsoft is a good candidate to buy them. They get a large stack of Unix patents to FUD Linux and the other Unix vendors with. It’s almost worth the cost _just_ for that. Secondly they get access to a huge number of Unix customer and can then work on converting them to Windows shops. Solaris is very definitely the “mass” commercial Unix - if you look at the numbers, they sell a lot of very small boxes. IBM and HP by comparison sell a much smaller number of much bigger boxes. Low-end Unix is of course the best target for Windows Server.
Sidenote: blimey four blogs in one day!
Posted: August 25th, 2008 under Linux.
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