“Are Apple and Sun viable partners,” asks The Register’s Andrew Orlowski?
Orlowski’s piece, “Sun-Apple rumors set markets jangling,” contains some remarkably frank and very well-written language.
Orlowski writes, “To start with the obvious, both are systems companies: vertically-integrated UNIX
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Amen, indeed!
Master of the obvious! At least for us Mac/Sun users.
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It is good to see more and more stories like this popping up of late. People are beginning to loathe the poor quality they are getting. Finally.
The price for power can be paid in either dollars or common sense. A mac will always be a viable tool. The same could be said for a Sun system or an SGI system. Heck, even Amiga Videotoasters broke the idea of PC-centric computing. When it has to work, you get what you pay for. As a multiplatform user, I get disgusted with my pc more often than I complain about my outdated g4 needing more power. I also built a pc system comparable to a g5, and it cost almost the same. No one counts using all name brand quality components and a near silent case – things you dont get with ANY low priced pc.
funny… I’ve been using Sun’s and Macs together for years. They work very well together in a mixed environment. Macs for applications and web servers, Sun’s for the really big, back-end (oracle) stuff. Very solid.
Sun’s support could stand to be a bit smoother. Their ESID system never seems to get worked out at contract time, the first time around, and their wait times are WAY to long at 1-800-USA-4-SUN, but oh well.
Thier hardware has gotten much better since the E4500 nightmare. Apple’s latest Xserve (slot loader) has come a long way as well. Racks easy, quickly, and are very stable. It’s makes for a good environment.
They might be able to “partner” the way Apple and Microsoft “partnered” but nothing more. Two egos… Steve Jobs and Scott McNealy… not many spaces are large enough for both.
Possibly if Apple buys Sun and fires Scott.
Sun and Apple need to enable OSx to run on networked domain servers (probably can, I don’t know) so that you could have iMacs in a building with their home directories on the servers in the server farm. Sun already does this with their SunRay products but it would better to have the nice OSX interface and the ability to have some client side processing and harddrive space.
With a little work the iMacs could be used to help sell Sun’s big Iron and big Iron could be used to sell bunches of iMacs and G5’s.
There doesn’t need to be much more than a limited partnerships, sort of like the iPod/VW Bug partnership.
I think Sun needs Apple more than Apple needs Sun. Apple could complement Sun very nicely in respect to the consumer and low-end server markets. Sun could also make great use of Apple’s design expertise — both in terms of software and hardware. So I see a benefit to Sun in this respect.
But wherein lies a benefit to Apple? Right now Sun is under siege in its high-end workstation and server market niches — from IBM, from HP, and from Dell (not to mention Linux). Sun is late in its embracing of Linux. I truly think that if Sun were given as an outright gift to Steve Jobs, almost the only useful technology to Apple would be Java and all Java-related products. What would Apple do with Solaris? What would it do with the Sparc chips?
If Apple wanted to move into the medium to high-end server market, what it would need most (in addition to full 64-bit capability) would be a bundled database manager solution — on the order of IBM’s DB2 or Oracle. This would make for a complete solution for the Fortune 1000 corporations. But does Sun offer such a product on its own? No.
Right now Apple is on track with its digital hub concept and it is also making the right moves with OS X Server (and in adopting more Unix conventions with each major release). It will surely continue to expand the XServer line and will indeed go fully 64-bit at some point. But Apple is not under siege in its consumer and graphics prepress markets the way Sun is in its high-end workstation and server markets.
I see Sun as a troubled company right now trying desperately to redefine itself. In contrast, I see Apple as a company which has largely ALREADY gone through a redefinition and its well on its way in the implementation of this new strategy. For all the foregoing reasons then, I don’t think Sun and Apple are really such a good fit — at least not at this time.
Having once worked at Sun for almost 5 years but having owned Macs for 10 years and having a Mac in front of my face at work and at home …
Sun is dying. It’s the next SGI. SGI is on life support (mainly from the military) because cheap PCs came along with cheaper price points and the graphics subsystems weren’t so much worse than SGI’s custom high-end chipsets that they couldn’t be used instead. And so as soon as some of the 3-D world vendors ported to NT and people could buy much cheaper PCs to run the same software on, SGI’s fate was sealed.
Similarly, Sun has the same sort of problems as SGI – their desktops are slow and have a crap GUI (CDE – only recently has GNOME 2.0 finally made an appearance on Solaris as a sidecar add-on). Techies are switching to Macs or Linux boxen in droves to have in front of their face instead of a Sun Ultra 5/10/30/60 (or the newer 1000’s and 2000’s) as in days of yore. As for the server market, again, cheap PCs and Linux are eating Sun alive at the low end. Sun is only still strong in the mid-range to high-end server market, and there’ll always be stiff competition there (IBM, HP). Again – it’s not like the halcyon days of yore when Sun’s revenues usually increased by 100% over the same quarter in the previous years.
I’m not sure what Sun has to offer Apple in a merger – is Apple looking to get into the high-end server marketplace? I don’t think so … and in every other market segment, Apple has better offerings (or roughly as good – compare the Xserve to a Sun Blade server). Other than a shared hatred for Microsoft, I don’t see what this marriage could bring to the table for Apple. Their markets may be complimentary, but that complimentary effect exists as 2 separate entities. They don’t need to merge for that to be the case.
I think Steve Jobs remembers last time NeXT and Sun worked together and what happened to that partnership. It was called OpenStep.
SO don’t hold your breath.
Mac OS X is focused on the digital hub, Solaris is focused on the large scale enterprise. I think of Xserves as being low end, whereas Sun server can go to the high end indeed (can you say “clustered Sunfire 15Ks?”). Software for the Mac is consumer-priced, whereas software licenses for Solaris is the usual exhorbitant corporate server pricing.
The reason big iron server companies are losing out to the low end is that both the iron and the software for them cost an arm & a leg, and the math of instead having a big pile of cheap stuff just makes too much sense financially. But what coporations give up in the process is performance, reliability, maintainability and scalability.
What I’m thinking would be both cool and mutually advantageous to both companies is if Xserves and Sun servers could interoperate closely, so that you could do things like drop an Xserve into a Sun HA cluster, or have an Xserve run Sun Management Console (those products have been rebundled and renamed, but I forget what they are now).
What this would mean is that Sun would have to graciously embrace the Xserve as an alternative to some of their low-end systems, perhaps even discontinuing models that compete too closely with the Xserve. Another thing that would be required is that someone would need to recompile Solaris applications under Mac OS X, and write drivers to handle the hardware differences. Apple would also probably have to convert Mac OS X to a true 64-bit system.
What Sun gets out of this is the ability to run their apps on the low end, and use it as a Trojan Horse for their high-end systems in the future. What Apple gets out of this is the ability to get into enterprises it could never dream of getting into, and competing for corporate IT mindshare. The one thing IT folks hate is a unique product with it’s own software and support requirement. One of the strikes against Apple, beyond the usual Wintel bigotry, is that (unfairly or not) it’s not industrial strength and it’s something new to have to learn.
Sun and Apple merge? No, it makes no sense. Cooperate and collaberate? I can hardly wait!
and where does IBM fit in here???