IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add To Web Heft
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
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...
I hope Sun gets back to its feet by itself.
Dropping SPARC completely would be foolish, better just rebrand everything to IBM and take it from there.
Think Compaq, now think Sun.
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.
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.
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.
And that Sun had one of the first full implementations (I think MIPS got there first).
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.
Just to be pedantic.
For me, IBM has looked likely to buy Sun for many years, because doing so would give IBM two things that would be very valuable to it
1) Java 2) Sun's Solaris customers.
There are other SPARC vendors (e.g. Fujitsu) that they could sell off to and focus on their own lines (probably with a provision to use the IP they see useful).
Edit: Btw, the ecosystem around SPARC is slowly eroding. Fin Svcs are going x86 more and more. The problem with SPARC is they aren't growing in new markets - it's becoming marginalised.
Just finished up working for IBM at a major ex-state-monopoly Telco, working at the worlds largest hedge fund right now.
What about Websphere vs. Glassfish?
This brings to mind Apple. Software, Design, and Integration are what distinguish Apple Computer, allowing them to charge a markup above the commodity level. The hardware is largely commodity hardware, except for the fact that it's slickly designed in a way that Apple's competitors have some difficulty matching, and that it's (supposedly) the only hardware that can run OS X. Various Hackintoshes testify to the true commodity nature of Apple hardware.
I've been predicting that someone is going to enter the low cost space and offer a truly integrated software/hardware experience based on Linux. I'm wondering if Apple is planning to do just that.
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.
This is key. Open Source often fail to reach a certain level of polish unless they find some way to receive corporate funding.
Evolution needs diversity.
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 .
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.
I was saying this in 2002.
Only the most adaptable survive.
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.
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.
The idea was that Sun becomes a designer of and licensor of state-of-the-art HW designs (which it may or may not implement). The designs come with software APIs too that different companies may want to implement.
The difficulty is that SPARC International is already a different organization to Sun. So, I don't know if they could've done this legally.
A second, interesting way, would be if Sun decided to make inexpensive SPARC desktops based on their T1 or T2 designs that encourage people to develop massively multi-threaded applications that run best in spaces where x86 boxes can't go just yet (and won't go until at least Larrabee). But they need to run and build something sexy like a Mac mini and they need it by last year or so. I doubt they could pull this one off.
As for me, I am going to stockpile Sun type 6 USB keyboards and matching mice, just to ensure my ability to have a keyboard with keys labeled Help, Stop, Again...
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.
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).
If IBM were smart they would enable a machine compilable version of Java to destroy C++.
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.
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.
If they were to rebuild the Sparc line this could also be done under the Sun brand. I could see rebuilding sparc to be useful particuarlly in response to the latest Intel AMD debacle. If they made something like KVM (kernel virtual machines) more strongly built into the hardware this would likewise help them push the line.
IBM is a smart company, they could definitely create a decent buisness plan to use Sun to their advantage.
Thus I think that Sparc will be among the first casualties if this merger goes through.
A merge with IBM would solidify their irrelevance if you ask me...
As a language, the best metaphor I can imagine is that Java is like the language of some Amazonian tribes. They don't have the concept of numbers bigger than 2. Its not about their brain power, just the way their culture and language has shaped their minds. That's basically what Java does to software engineers.
But the language itself doesn't enforce this; it is very possible to write concise software in Java. What's better still, is you can use a Groovy (or JRuby, or Jython), and still use the HUGE class library provided by Java.
If you haven't played with it, give one of the JVM dynamic languages a go.