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WSJ says: "IBM in Talks to Buy Sun". But Why would IBM buy Sun Microsystems?Posted by kalali on March 18, 2009 at 6:51 AM PDT
The Wall Street Journal Published an article which discuss possibility of IBM buying Sun Microsystems, but why on earth should IBM take over Sun Microsystems when every product which Sun offer has a counterpart in IBM arsenal. In software range Sun offers Operating System, Database, Application server family of products, identity management family of product, Integration series of products either developed by Sun or acquired from other companies, Software development tools including NetBeans and its related add-ons. All of these products has a counterpart in IBM series of products. In hardware range Sun offers Storages, X86 and Sparc servers, and networking solutions. All of these products have their counterpart in IBM arsenal and having them add no exceptional value to IBM set of available products which make IBM take over Sun Microsystems. But Why would IBM think about buying Sun Microsystems and what Sun own that IBM does not?
*All of these products except JCAPS and Sun xVM Ops are open source. And all of them are high quality with a well established community of user and third party companies which are involved in their development. Now, Why could be possible reason that we hear "IBM in Talks to Buy Sun"? The reason can be:
What can happen if IBM take over Sun Microsytems? The answer is: no one knows expect those IBM super managers which are possibly thinking about this take over. But some predictions:
I may have missed some items due to short term forgetfulness or being completely unaware of their presence. If you happen to know them, let me know and I will include it in this blog. »
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Community Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)
Submitted by aglasgow on Wed, 2009-03-18 07:55.
I certainly understand why IBM is interested in Sun. Acquisition would provide IBM with a greater market-share of HW sales and allow them to better compete with HP. Also, the SW patents and intellectual property owned by Sun must be very attractive to IBM.
However, IBM has tendency to ruin good software. I remember using Lotus software before the IBM acquisition, and it was very good software at the time. Now it is all junk, and apps like Lotus Notes and WebSphere WDSC are both terrible pieces of software.
Submitted by swv on Wed, 2009-03-18 11:41.
This is M and A mania ala RJR Nabisco and AOL/ Times Warner. This is going to destroy Sun’s legacy and cost IBM big time.
The only reason IBM would buy Sun is to acquire rights to Sun’s patents and then wield them despotically in a way Sun never did. The long story there is this will accelerate the movement to simply ban software patents the way business method patents were all but disposed of by the Supreme Court recently.
What does Sun have that IBM wants? This is not about a smaller company being bought for their technology. It’s about a larger company buying a weakened rival in order to kill off it’s competitor. This is HP and Compaq / Carly Fiorina II.
Sun could continue as it is. It has the cash. It has the vision. The future of computing / cloud based applications, PaaS SaaS is on its side. If anything, they’ve been too far ahead of their times.
If IBM buys Sun you can bet that developers will desert Java en mass since IBM has their “own†VM just they way they have their “own†GUI toolkit for Java. IN the software arena, IBM has the worst case of NIH ever seen. Their developers are convinced they can do everything “betterâ€, with marginal results and more importantly, the creation of discontinuities in technology development and adoption. IBM broke the Java the GUI community into two camps for NO good effect when it introduced SWT. So also with Eclipse, which is a poor imitation of IntelliJ and NB. The cultural differences between IBM and Sun’s developers are where the rubber will meet the road on this M and A. Developers aren’t so many thinking cogs that you can shuffle around from company to company, like other “assetsâ€. They’re people with a POV and an attitude about what they do. That is, to the extent they’re any good at what they do. To the victor, IBM< will not go the spoils.
Here’s a dose of reality to all my friends on Wall Street and in management at both companies. Beneath the level of anything any analyst can see or quantify, there’s little tiny social and psychological micro-events that determine how the knowledge that’s in the heads and practices of Sun’s employees - which is what gives Sun its real value - gets “transferred†(or not) to IBM. So you bought the company. So what. trust me, you didn’t buy the developers. Quite the opposite. IF you think you can walk into any part of Sun’s IP, excepting the patents, and take ownership of it, you and Wall Street have a big surprise coming. It’s not under your control, and it never was and it never will be. The culture clash between the Sun way of doing things, egalitarian, optimistic, inventive, forward looking and social is going to slam head on into IBM’s well documented culture of manipulation, mean spirited employee relations, exploitative relationships with its customers (billable hours), aggressive and opportunistic use of the broken IP system (Phelps), divisive, conceited and rank-abusing management hierarchy, forced rankings among employees where the bottom 10% are automatically fired, etc. etc.
Prediction- the best of Sun’s employee’s flee to Google and Adobe, the rest foot drag and passively resist their new-found hell, IBM destroys zfs, Netbeans and other middleware products, Swing and finally Java itself through a combination ineptitude , alienation of key developers, grandiosity and conceit and when it’s all over a huge amount of really good stuff simply no longer exists, the market is poorer and the forward momentum of software development is set back by 15 years.
Submitted by jwenting on Thu, 2009-03-19 14:52.
Removing Sun from the Java market would leave IBM in a position to effectively remove the Java market as far as its competitors are concerned. While undercutting WebLogic (BEA/Oracle have their own JVM) might not work, JBoss is a far bigger headache for WebSphere sales and can't survive without the Sun JDK. The Sun JDK would not survive IBM ownership, and neither would OpenJDK survive without the funding Sun now provides.
So IBM might well be planning to turn Java into a WebSphere-only language, hoping to gain marketshare in the application server market in both the hardware and software segments by removing both Sun and those competitors that depend on Sun funding directly or indirectly for their continued existence. Killing off Netbeans would remove some lice in the Eclipse pelt, but it's no match for Eclipse anyway and has little market share as is.
Submitted by kalali on Thu, 2009-03-19 15:08.
Redhat as a business entity is pushing project IcedTea which supposed to be the fully open source JDK provided by Redhat. They are already bundling it with the operating system and if IBM go toward killing Sun JDK they will certainly accelerate the development or they may license Oracle JVM....
The main concern about this takeover is Sun sponsored open source projects including OpenSolaris, MySQL, GlassFish and so on. These are a set of great products which IBM may try to turn them into zombie, orphan projects and let them die slowly. Although it is very unlikely but every coin has two sides :-)
Submitted by wordwarrior on Tue, 2009-03-24 10:57.
@jwenting
Just curious, have you actually *tried* Netbeans? It comes with far more functionality out of the box, and many developers swear that it's better than Eclipse.
@kalali
Glassfish will be fine, since it has a large community independent of Sun, as well as MySQL. I'm not so sure about OpenSolaris and Netbeans, but closed source Solaris should survive since it has far too many customers for IBM to kill.
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