http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/technology/business-computing/06blue.html

I'm glad about that, I think Sun can do a lot better. Also, IBM's behavior with 
stimulus funds on one hand, and buying Sun on the other had an overt appearance 
of fiscal impropriety.

There are better matches to be had, but I think that most any deal is going to 
suffer some problems because a whole hell of a lot of Sun technology is very 
advanced. IBM's bad offer reflects how the concurrent incomprehension can 
complicate potential deals. 

It's hard for a lot of companies to make innovative leaps through a merger, 
even incrementally. The best example of it occurring recently though that I can 
think of has been the adoption of ZFS outside of Sun. On one hand, companies 
like Microsoft are still falling back to closed source patents on DOS fs 
mechanics, on the other their competitor took a huge leap forward and adopted 
ZFS. That was risky for Apple, but it worked well because the technology is 
open source, and that gave them a margin of safety. I can't say I'm a fan of 
Apple's development practices from a business perspective, but they do have 
some undeniable clue there too. Aside from waving an Iphone at people, that 
probably serves as a better example for my point.

Another option that should be on the table is the application of stimulus 
funds, in terms of targeting money, taxpayers would be way better off than they 
would with say, IBM's half-baked proposals.

I'm concerned about mainframey matches, because frankly Sun does a better job 
with legacy support than most companies, and I don't want to see a system that 
works thrown out for some of the poor waters other companies suffer from. 
There's engineering that goes into the process of aging out technology that 
other companies just don't understand, much less possess. If you're a customer 
in an era of virtual machines, that sort of thing matters more, not less. The 
Themis contortions that were accompanying the IBM deal are an example of 
floundering on the part of IBM over that subject alone.


Tim
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