

IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add To Web Heft  - sown
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123735124997967063.html

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whatusername
A few thoughts through the SUN product line: (Anyone else got ideas that I
missed?)

SPARC - likely gone.. IBM will probably stick with Power.

JAVA - might be good for it.. IBM are big supporters of java, with Eclipse,
IBM JRE's, etc

MySQL - interesting dilemma - IBM have DB2 CE or whatever it's called as a
free DB engine - mysql is not at DB2 level (yet) by any stretch - but if it's
good enough - then is it a revenue threat

Solaris - IBM have an awesome NIX variant in AIX. Of course - that's why they
now push Linux so much.. :P Not sure what would happen to solaris here...

DTrace - obviously kept - maybe linux/aix porting? (we can hope)

ZFS - again - you'd assume they would keep it.

Disk Storage - The thumper, etc seem like pretty good products.. IBM have some
storage kit developed internally (DS8000 etc) - and some I believe is OEM.. I
_think_ that some gear like the Thumper might be able to replace the OEM
gear... (Would also be quite nice behind an SVC)

StorageTek (Tape Drives) - These will need some consolidation (although again
- some of IBM's kit is OEM) - but at the top end - I would have said that the
SL8500 (Sun's) trumps the TS3500 (IBM's) at the high end - so that could be
dramatic..

Intel/AMD based servers - I'd guess they'll keep them seperate for as long as
they can - eventually standardising down to one of the two lines? (Or perhaps
spinning some/all out to Lenovo or someone like that?)

OpenOffice - since IBM are pushing it (or a badged variant of it) as Lotus
Symphony - you'd assume it would be sticking around...

HPC - I can't see IBM dropped BlueGene - but I've got no clue what Sun are
really doing in the space... (from wiki: In 2006, Sun built the TSUBAME
supercomputer, which was until June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia.
.... Ranger has a peak performance of over 500 TFLOPS, and is currently the
6th most powerful supercomputer on the TOP500 list (November 2008).)

And Wikipedia has a nice listing of all the goodness of sun hardware:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sun_Microsystems_hardw...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sun_Microsystems_hardware)

~~~
adrianwaj
There is a whole vendor ecosystem around high-end SPARC/Solaris systems,
especially in financial services and telcos. It could take a number of years
for these corporations to move onto IBM gear if that was the key.

Dropping SPARC completely would be foolish, better just rebrand everything to
IBM and take it from there.

Think Compaq, now think Sun.

~~~
tptacek
That's been true of every other architecture that was inexorably marginalized
by x86. You're right that IBM isn't going to unceremoniously drop it. But it's
dead, and good riddance.

~~~
adrianwaj
I remember McNealy admitting they underestimated 32 bit architecture and
placed too much on 64 bit.

Another error might have been overvaluing its vertically integrated SW/HW
solution technically and financially, and not commoditizing it quickly enough
through open-source and hardware cloning.

Spreading one's wealth goes against one's better judgement often, but the
rewards come back in unseen ways.

~~~
tptacek
In Sun's case I think it's simpler than that: SPARC hardware carries a steep
premium over commodity x86, a good chunk of that premium is actually intended
to pay for Sun's software stack, and Sun simply hasn't executed well enough on
the software side to merit the premium.

Sun did a lot of engineering stuff "right" in the late '90s, and again over
the past couple years: they were first to market with a mainstream-grade MP
kernel and first to market with a mainstream 64 bit OS, and recently they have
ZFS and DTrace to talk about.

On the other hand, I think you could have predicted probably starting in 2001
that nobody was going to pay that much for large-scale MP, 64 bits, and
advanced filesystems; the entire server market swung to web stacks, which
scale horizontally and move most of the systems management burden into a DBMS
and out of the Adrian Cockroft and Chris Drake systems engineering realm where
Sun has excelled.

I really think that if you compare the systems-level innovation at Apple to
the systems-level innovation at Sun, Apple comes out ahead. And systems-level
innovation isn't even their core competancy.

~~~
jwilliams
I think there was another big sea-change caused by AMD.

Before this, architecture and ISA were absolutely key - RISC was the way of
the future. RISC architectures were theoretically running loops around CISC
ones.

AMD bolted a CISC onto a RISC core and effectively made this architecture
point moot. This approach let AMD and Intel use their momentum and market to
catch up and overtake their workstation friends.

~~~
tptacek
I thought Intel invented the micro-op architecture with the Pentium Pro.

~~~
jwilliams
Yeah - although microcode had been around for a very long time.

The difference between microcode and RISC was the amount of synchronisation -
RISC generally implied lots of uniform, high performance operations. Microcode
could, but didn't necessarily. e.g. Microcode could still be doing funky co-
ordination with lots of specialised execution units (and did afaik). This has
some similarities to RISC, but RISC is a different philosophy really - namely
fewer types, pipelined accesses, uniform instructions, more registers, etc.

(In my view) the big watershed moment was AMD's K5 architecture. This was
literally based on one of AMD's pure RISC designs. It wasn't that popular in
itself, but it set up a golden age for AMD... Which really only came to an end
with Intel's Core.

~~~
tptacek
Microcode is an implementation technique. Micro-ops (or whatever Intel
formally calls them) is an instruction dispatch architecture --- an actual
microarchitectural feature.

Just to be pedantic.

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aagnihot
This article quotes the acquisition at around $6.5
billion(<http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52H1GS20090318>).
StorageTek acquisition was $4.1
billion([http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/01/HNsunstortekcomple...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/01/HNsunstortekcomplete_1.html))
and MySql AB acquisition was around $1 billion. That makes $5 billion. So is
rest of the Sun worth $1.5 billion? Clearly, it seems that these acquisitions
have decreased Sun's valuation, rather than increasing it. Also, I didn't see
any point in buying MySql AB for $1 billion.

------
alexandros
It would be a sad day if Sun stopped being independent, but IBM does seem to
be the best match that will preserve the most of Sun. Maybe they can even fix
some of the JCP and OOo policy problems. On the other hand, NetBeans will
probably go the way of the dodo..

~~~
stcredzero
A friend of mine pointed out that commoditizing someone's product was a great
offensive move. He thought that was why IBM funded so many open source
projects, many of which were in the Java space. He pointed out that Eclipse is
one of the slickest Java IDEs, and what is an Eclipse, but an occlusion of
Sun?

~~~
briansmith
IBM and Microsoft have taken two different tracks. IBM is trying to everything
except custom software development and support contracts because those are the
most profitable short-term. They give away low-quality software that is
difficult to use and missing important features; then they charge every user
the full cost of fixing these problems. Basically, IBM wants you to rent
expensive people to run your free software.

Microsoft is trying to make custom software development and support contracts
unnecessary by selling quality, feature-full software. I'm sure lots of people
want to say something snarky about Microsoft's _actual_ software quality, but
at least recognize that it is the plan. Basically, Microsoft wants you to buy
software that ends up being much cheaper than renting people. Ultimately, they
want you to computing appliances that are powered by their software and which
don't require _any_ maintenance or custom coding.

By the way, there is nothing slick about Eclipse. I am using it every day to
write S60 applications and I hate it. I am using IntelliJ IDEA 5.1 (three or
four years old, three major versions behind) and IntelliJ is much, much
better.

~~~
ciupicri
You're forgetting about all the Microsoft Certified people and their
consulting services, e.g.
<http://www.microsoft.com/uk/services/consulting/adc.mspx>

~~~
briansmith
No, I'm not. Microsoft _does_ have consultants and certification and probably
always will. However, every release of every one of their products is designed
to reduce the need for those people. For example, the ultimate goal of
SharePoint is to remove and/or substantially reduce the need for custom
website development.

------
osipov
Owning VirtualBox virtualization software is a great reason for IBM to buy
Sun. IBM is trying to be a major player in the cloud computing space, but it
relies on Xen and VMWare for x86 virtualization technology. IBM doesn't have
much influence on Xen and its open source development community. Obviously IBM
has even less influence over VMWare. So buying a solid x86 virtualization
stack like VirtualBox would make IBM a serious contender for cloud computing
deployments built from commodity x86 boxes.

~~~
greyboy
Solaris also has zones, which has been tremendously powerful for our
customers.

~~~
tptacek
I suspect you could have made Xen (on the high end) or Jails (on the low end)
equally as powerful. I'm not a fan of Zones, and of all the Solaris
innovations of the past couple years, I think Zones have the least staying
power.

~~~
patrickg-zill
Yes, you have made your bias very clear on Zones here on HN every time the
subject has come up. Clearly they don't work well for you. However, people do
use Zones and they clearly do work well.

I suppose you have figured out how to use a jail to limit memory and CPU
resources of the programs running in a jail? Ooops, that is a zone-only
feature; like the time I set up Oracle in a zone and limited it to using no
more than 4GB RAM .

~~~
tptacek
On the high end, I'd use Xen, like all the major large-scale hosting providers
do. On the low end, I wouldn't bother trying to do fine grained resource
control.

It's not exactly insightful to point out my bias against Zones in a response
to a comment where I basically say "I'm biased against Zones". I am indeed
biased. And I can defend my argument that, as a technological approach, trying
to compartmentalize all the kernel namespaces and building ad hoc group-level
rlimits is a dead end.

For what it's worth, just as your bias in favor of Zones (which I don't fault
you for) is based on professional experience, so too is my bias against them.

------
adrianwaj
Sun were a good 5 years too late open-sourcing their software stack including
Java and Solaris, and should have made their hardware easily licensed for
cloning.

I was saying this in 2002.

Only the most adaptable survive.

~~~
davidw
I love open source, and if I had the money, would work with nothing else. That
said... for a big business like Sun, would that really have helped? Maybe
their stuff would have been more popular, but it would have required a
_wrenching_ transition to services that might have hurt them very deeply.

~~~
adrianwaj
I think they should have taken this alternate Open path and coupled it with
business-as-usual in the rest of the organization.

So they lose revenues in the normal part of Sun because those customers now
pickup their SW for nothing essentially, and instead of Sun then laying off
employees, they are shifted into services. One area goes down, another goes
up.

Hardware at Sun then becomes less focused on manufacturing, and more about
building a community of external implementors by providing good HW designs and
support.

I'm thinking theoretically.

~~~
davidw
> instead of Sun then laying off employees, they are shifted into services.
> One area goes down, another goes up.

The same people that might make great software producers might be lousy at
services, so it's entirely possible that large layoffs would still happen,
which would hurt morale. Indeed, 'services' is a different industry, and it's
not like you can just pick up from one day to the next and become a services
company. IBM managed to do that, so maybe they would be a good fit, but it's
not an easy thing to accomplish in any case.

------
sireat
Sun was undervalued and even at the price IBM appears to be offering, Sun is a
good value.

Why? Sun still has elaborate R&D, strong balance sheet, multiple revenue
streams. Granted, it had overpaid for many acquisitions(I am looking at you
MySQL) and hasn't figured out exactly how to leverage all that OSS into
income.

~~~
tptacek
"Elaborate" does seem like the right word here.

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pstuart
AMD has a market cap of 1.70B, they could fold that in too.

------
jwilliams
IBM should turn Sun into a cloud division. With Java/J2EE, MySQL and their
storage/data center expertise it seems like a good match?

A full featured J2EE cloud solution could get a lot of traction with all the
many corporates heavily invested in Java and looking to reduce costs (IMHO).

~~~
IMorgothI12
IBM probably should drop AIX for Solaris.

If IBM were smart they would enable a machine compilable version of Java to
destroy C++.

~~~
lallysingh
Or even better, a good language to replace them both.

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indiejade
Smart move. One of IBM's core competencies is hardware (assembly); one of
Sun's core competencies is software (esp. virtual space software) and
innovation.

The danger, of course, would be in losing that innovation when/if the
acquisition occurs. If IBM does end up acquiring Sun, it would probably be a
good idea to let it maintain as much independence as possible. There seems to
be an inverse relationship between size of an organization and its ability to
adapt and innovate.

~~~
Xichekolas
Except that IBM has been selling their hardware units off for years... hard
drives to Hitachi, laptops to Lenovo, etc. IBM's core competency now is
consulting services supporting software.

I think Sun makes sense for them to acquire (their business models are
becoming quite similar already)... but IBM's days of having a hardware focus
are over.

~~~
TJensen
Do you think their HPC and server hardware will go, too? I'm guessing they'll
stay in whatever hardware business is not commoditized, which means a lot of
Sun's hardware fits into IBM's portfolio.

~~~
Xichekolas
Yeah definitely agree that they'll stay in HPC... like you say, anything that
is custom and requires design/support.

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aagnihot
Moreover, there is an important lesson to learn. Open source is not the
solution for poor revenues. Sun has OpenSPARC, OpenSolaris, Java, OpenOffice,
MySql and what not...But in terms of revenue, it hardly made a difference.

------
geuis
All I can say is Timer Warner / AOL. Not a popular opinion, but I really hope
Sun dies. I'm probably not up to snuff on their product lines, but I know
they've developed and promoted the atrocity that is Java and I think they're
quickly killing Mysql. IBM, on the other hand, has proven itself as a company
that can reinvent itself over and over and have been doing some very cool
things. They're one of the few classic companies that still do actual long
term R&D without the requirements that they crank new products out in the next
2 years. It would be really bad for them to buy Sun.

~~~
Dobbs
Sun has some amazing engineering staff. They produced such wonders as Dtrace,
Sparc, and ZFS. If IBM were to buy them and take the good portions it would be
a huge boon to IBM, Open Source and the software/computing community.

~~~
delano
Dtrace is an incredibly technology. Debugging performance problems _in
production_ is literally a dream come true.

~~~
nailer
It's also much easier to use than SystemTap.

