88Pro Thinking

Sometime back I wrote a blog titled “Sun – There is hope?”. Recently after getting into RSS feeds, I have been regularly following Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog who is the President and Chief Operating Officer Sun Microsystems. I have earlier mentioned that Sun missed the Linux buss, but if you read this, this and this from Jonathan’s posts it will be clear, that he thinks, IBM and HP hopping into Linux (specially Red Hat) is a big strategic mistake. His point being if IBM and HP promoted Red Hat as an OS for their hardware, at the end of the day, they just become the box Supplier, because there is not much product differentiation. In his own words,

“To me, HP's problems spawn from the death of... their operating system, HP/UX. Like IBM, they've elected to ask their customers and ISV's to move to Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Windows on x86 systems. And if you're an ISV, how does that differentiate HP? - they're a box vendor. If you're a customer, where does that leave you with your HP/UX investments? Facing untimely change - with a vendor no longer in charge of their OS.” – [Jonathan Schwartz]

Moreover it looks like one of Sun’s new buss is going to be Solaris/Opteron systems. While Intel’s public admission that Itanium is going nowhere, HP might have to reconsider its strategy. At the same time it looks like a healthy strategy for Sun to go with Opteron and Open Solaris.

posted by 88Pro / Monday, September 13, 2004