Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 3rd Dec 2002 01:59 UTC
Recently, a few independent departments (Solaris, java, Netscape and other middleware) at Sun Microsystems got integrated into one, the Platform/Software Group. We had a quick chat with Mr John Fowler, Sun Software's CTO about Solaris 10, Java, the competition and more.
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It depends on whether Sun has the option of using the poison pill. If so, not even a gorila like MS could buy them. I know, for example, that Novell has such a contingency plan, so MS couldn't touch them, even though MS salivated after Novell's NDS.
But even if MS could, would it want to buy Sun? Sun is staunchily anti-Microsoft. It's a matter of pride and corporate culture. If MS bought them, they would witness an unprecedented hemorragy of engineers, who would probably form a company that sells SPARC-based servers.
They can do that! SPARC is an open architecture, and Solaris is fully UNIX98 compliant, about the most standards-compliant and open OS.
Or they could go to Fujitsu and improve their range of SPARC-based servers.
Microsoft would gain very little, and it would cost them a lot of money. I don't think they can justify such a move, in the eyes of shareholders and BOD.