IBM On The Verge of Buying Sun for $7 billion | Hacker News Reader

IBM On The Verge of Buying Sun for $7 billion

nytimes.com

61 pointsojbyrne24 comments

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.

They're interesting, but you have to BUY them to play with them :(

But everyone in select industries (telecoms?) wants Linux on mainframes or DB2, which still beats crap out of Oracle for some workloads. And don't forget the IBM Research

IBM has services and they're better at them. I think it could be a good pairing. Allow Sun to focus on things they're good at with the strength of a solid services company behind them.

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.

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.

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.

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

To monetize, you need a combination of strategic vision and marketing. "Strategic vision and marketing" is basically Apple! (Also IBM, but in it's more conventional, stodgy way.)

I had a similar experience at my school. In 1995-96 most of the existing Sun workstations in the computer labs were replaced with Gateway boxes running Windows NT.

Sun should have built affordable Mac mini-like SPARC T1 or T2 desktops to foster multi-threaded application development they were uniquely well positioned to take advantage of. Almost nobody will buy a rackmount server just to explore some new idea, but a lot of dedicated nerds would buy a Windows-proof desktop running Solaris if only because it's really cool.

And no. Macs are not the new Unix desktop of choice. The portion of Mac users that are aware of its Unix heart is pretty meaningless. Most Mac users buy Mac because it's pretty and just about every other Mac user buys them because they work well.

I'm just glad that Sun passed on buying Apple, back when it could have.

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

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.

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.

Also, Data General.

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

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

Netbeans has been showing some real improvements recently, it'd be a shame if it gets killed. I'm hoping they'll maintain both, like Autodesk is doing with 3ds Max and Maya.

It would be a shame. I prefer NetBeans for doing server-side Java.

But I prefer almost anything to server-side Java ;-)

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...

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

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.

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

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

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