Jonathan Schwartz writes an open letter to IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano, urging him to get IBM apps ported over to Solaris 10. To me it seems, Sun’s customers are saying, well no IBM software, no buying Sun. Or all these could just be a way to get some excitement going – god knows Silicon Valley is back, and Sun is making no noise. Jokes aside, Schwartz sees this as a strategy to trap customers into IBM’s proprietary Power5 platform only. Not true – WebSphere for instance runs on Windows and Linux-Intel. Ditto for rational. Beyond that, why should IBM even do this. First it is backing Linux to the hilt. Secondly, Solaris is a proprietary Unix flavor from a competitor, which also uses its own “lock-in” chips.
I work for Sun.
The release of Solaris as open source has already been announced. “Proprietary” is no longer appropriate.
Check out our new Opteron based machines. No chip “lock-in” involved.
What does Sun expect IBM to do? Roll-over and let Sun take its business? Why does anyone pay any attention to Sun anymore. They lost the plot way back in 2000/2001 and have been going down the toilet ever since.
Sun’s business model cannot cope with the new reality of low-cost Linux clusters and since about 2003, Sun has been scrambling to get as much professional services dollars into its coffers to offest the heavy losses on the hardware side. Funny thing is that while Sun expands its professional services business it whinges about IBM Global Services hoovering up customers wallets.
“WHINGING” is really the operative word for Sun. McNealy was and continues to be a whinger and Schwartz is following in the same steps.