

IBM On The Verge of Buying Sun for $7 billion - ojbyrne
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/technology/business-computing/03blue.html

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spitfire
This is a shame Sun lost it's way. I was looking forward to playing with one
of Sun's coolthreads servers. That's about the only interesting thing
happening in hardware these days.

As far as things go this is really a negative. Sun was doing all the right
moves (slowly). Interesting hardware - coolthreads, open-sourcing software
left and right. IBM has... Linux on mainframes and consulting.

Both Sun and SGI slowly lost out as Apple become the new Unix desktop of
choice.

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wheels
Sun and SGI lost out long before that. It's not like people just stopped
buying Sun workstations a couple years ago; they were already out of style a
decade ago. While I was in college, in the late 90s, I saw all of the
workstations that were Sun's when I came in be replaced by PCs running Linux.
This was before OS X 1.0 even was available, and it was a few more years even
before Mac users started warming to OS X.

Sun might have been doing some interesting things, but they've pretty much had
a decade of investing into technologies they don't have a way to monetize,
both in software and hardware. I'm just glad that it's IBM buying them since I
think of the potential acquirers, that IBM would be the closest fit to keep
some of their character intact.

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gaius
What killed SGI was high-end applications (mechanical engineering, 3D
graphics, oil & gas exploration, computational chemistry) being ported to NT
and the Windows games industry underwriting the development of graphics cards
powerful enough to rival workstations at a fraction of the price. Neither
Linux nor OSX were significant factors in the downfall of SGI.

~~~
wheels
That's a good point, but I don't think it's the whole story, and is probably
more true for SGI than Sun.

I think part of my bias in how I see things was I really only caught the tail
end of Sun's heyday in the early days of web serving when a lot was being
served up by Sun machines running Netscape's web server. In universities there
was also a shift from Solaris to Linux, but by the time I was away from
working student jobs (did admin and web app devel for the college starting in
'97) those spaces were Linux dominated.

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Keyframe
I don't know whether to be excited about this or sad.

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mridulkhan
I'm excited. Both of them own some really great products and are amazing at
R&D. On top of that IBM is practical and profitable.

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Keyframe
I agree with you. Both IBM and Sun have some really amazing R&D and almost all
technological stacks in both companies can be merged and benefit (unless IBM
kills all of Suns product lines - which it won't). DB2 <-> MySQL, IBM
processors <-> Sun processors, Sun brings Workstations in the IBM house once
again, Storage systems also, etc..

What I'm sad about is that the third pillar of once paragon of high
performance computing is falling down. First DEC, then SGI and now SUN. I miss
those magical times.

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access_denied
Also, Data General.

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adammarkey
I imagine Netbeans will go the way of the Dodo since the Eclipse project is
IBM's baby.

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signa11
total eclipse of the sun. sorry couldn't resist :o)

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rjurney
With IBM pushing their own cloud - does this mean I might one day be able to
fire up a bunch of 32 thread boxes to do my bidding?

Hey, a guy can dream...

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modoc
It seems wrong somehow that IBM would spend $7 billion on an acquisition,
immediately after laying off thousands of employees.

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hko
It's not really spending. What's presumably happening is that the companies
are merging, and the Sun part of the merger is going to worth $7 billion.

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dforbin
ibm makes a ton of money from consulting. more products is good for this.

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gaius
Not for customers it isn't. You only need consultants if you're churning
rather than upgrading your kit...

