We’ll be exploring this emerging news about a possible acquisition of Sun Microsystems [JAVA] by rival IBM [IBM]. And it is shocking news, to be sure, but would it be a bad thing?
Sun and its Competitors
Sun has been languishing in the stock market for a few years at this point. Its competitors, such as IBM and HP [HPQ] and Oracle [ORCL] and Microsoft [MSFT], engage its customers at all sides, and it competes against all comers across multiple segments, from hardware to software to services.
Sun’s Strong and Not-So-Strong Points
It is difficult to fault Sun for sticking to its proverbial guns as a hardware vendor, since its products are definitely quality items technically. Also, its technological innovations are certainly top-grade: UltraSPARC, Solaris, Java, ZFS, etc. And its contributions to the developer community are unquestionable as well.
But Sun has also suffered from the fading gleam of the dot-bomb era. Although it has been several years since that defining event in the Internet age, it still has that stigma for many managers. It also has the unfortunate label of being too “expensive” across its wide product portfolio. Some of this may be warranted, as directors and managers browsing its online server catalog may tell you. But, like many other companies, you have to look around for the deals… which is where Sun’s involvement in open source projects enters the picture. On the Java side, the combination of Sun’s ownership of the Java brand, its stewardship over the platform, and the multitude of software (and third party hardware!) developed on the platform make it a compelling story to be 100% Java… 
Even if you are not a Java developer and/or user, you may still have benefited from the cultural renaissance that it brought to the developer workflows and methodologies. Unlike Smalltalk, which had seemed to be relegated to a small niche target audience (and remember IBM’s involvement with that? 
), Java was ambitiously launched (and many would say, relaunched a few times) toward a much broader audience, for both desktop and server development. It is difficult to say “Web 2.0+” without thinking about Java’s role in bringing it to fruition.
And even if you do not code in Java the language, you may be using products or languages that operate on the Java platform: Groovy, PHP, Python, Ruby, and other dynamic languages either natively operate on a JVM or have variants that do. And you may be using development tools that, while created in Java, enable you to code in several different languages– many times, all at once if you’d like. Sun’s participation in these various development projects has been strong, so it would be hard to ignore the contributions of its employees and its support for their work in these areas.
Recent acquisitions by Sun have fleshed out its product portfolio more, including its purchase of MySql. And its widening of its open source support, particularly in the OpenSolaris, VirtualBox, and LAMP/SAMP deployments, have painted a fairly comprehensive soup-to-nuts picture of how being fully Sun-ized from development to production is certainly possible.
But perhaps the lesson from IBM’s past is something which has finally caught up to Sun: while it is certainly possible to be the end-all, be-all for IT, it may not necessarily be the best thing because the accommodating customer base has dramatically shrunken since the heady days of the dot-coms. Many potential customers are dealing with heterogeneous computing platforms, and integrating heritage systems with newer ones has greater perceived value to them. And for customers who want to do everything from scratch, finding a single-source vendor for everything appears to be a scary concept to be avoided at all costs, literally. IBM’s course of action was to cut back on its hardware focus, and instead turn its attention toward service and software engagements. Perhaps this is the way of things: further commoditize the hardware concept, but differentiate using software and services.
Just don’t cut back on the innovation.
Coming Soon
This is intended to be the first in a multi-part series, where we explore a variety of aspects surrounding Sun and Java. Stay tuned!
N.B.
Other title candidates:
- Sun to be Acquired by IBM?
- The Future of Sun: Acquired by IBM?
