IBM no longer interested in Sun at any price

[Qu0ll]

Today's reports suggest that upon further inspection of the possible Sun
takeover, IBM has walked away completely from the deal citing potential
difficulties with anti-trust legislation and contracts as the main reasons.

Other reports suggest Sun is still looking for a buyer having lost ground on
the server market to rivals and because they are expected to announce a 3rd
successive quarter of substantial losses.

The sooner Sun starts charging for its open-source products and services the
better IMHO.

--
And loving it,

-Qu0ll (Rare, not extinct)
_________________________________________________
(e-mail address removed)
[Replace the "SixFour" with numbers to email me]

 

[Mark Space]

The sooner Sun starts charging for its open-source products and services
the better IMHO.

I disagree there. It may be funny to laugh at Steve Ballmer as he jumps
around shouting "developers! Developers! Developers" but I'd bet quite a
lot that he knows what he's talking about.

Giving away Java and development tools ensures a large pool of trained
developers, which benefits Sun greatly. It's up to them to capitalize
on that. If you're refering to something like requireing a license fee
from end users for something like running Tomcat, I believe that the
same idea applies. Sun would just be cutting their own throats and
would shrink the pool of personnel experienced with their products.

 

[Mike Schilling]

I disagree there. It may be funny to laugh at Steve Ballmer as he
jumps around shouting "developers! Developers! Developers" but I'd
bet quite a lot that he knows what he's talking about.

Giving away Java and development tools ensures a large pool of trained
developers, which benefits Sun greatly. It's up to them to capitalize
on that. If you're refering to something like requireing a license
fee from end users for something like running Tomcat, I believe that
the same idea applies. Sun would just be cutting their own throats
and would shrink the pool of personnel experienced with their
products.

What Sun needed to do (and has failed at, badly), is to create Java-based
sotfware they could charge for: if not software license, then support and
consulting. In the J2EE server realm, for instance, the only thing that
prevented Sun's various server offerings from being players as big as
WebSphere or Weblogic was incompetence.

 

[Mike Schilling]

Yeah that's my impression too. I have no idea how Sun managed to flub
that one.

Keep acquiring companies until you own four or five different web servers.
Choose among them for political rather than technical reasons. Be sure to
pick the one maintained by people who in six months can leave with large
stock grants fully vested.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Today's reports suggest that upon further inspection of the possible Sun
takeover, IBM has walked away completely from the deal citing potential
difficulties with anti-trust legislation and contracts as the main reasons.

I don't think the anti-trust legislation has changed much the last few
weeks since IBM were interested.

Maybe they are just playing hardball about the price.

Or maybe both parties has painted themselves into a corner.

Other reports suggest Sun is still looking for a buyer having lost
ground on the server market to rivals and because they are expected to
announce a 3rd successive quarter of substantial losses.

If the deal indeed is finally off, then I think IBM will do much better
than SUN.

The sooner Sun starts charging for its open-source products and services
the better IMHO.

At least for the Java product the circumstances are:
- SUN did try and sell them but failed miserable
- they are now released as open source which allows
everybody that has a copy to modify the source and
distribute it for free

I find it difficult to see how they could make much money on them.

They can make some money on support. And I believe that is what they
are already doing.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Giving away Java and development tools ensures a large pool of trained
developers, which benefits Sun greatly. It's up to them to capitalize
on that. If you're refering to something like requireing a license fee
from end users for something like running Tomcat, I believe that the
same idea applies. Sun would just be cutting their own throats and
would shrink the pool of personnel experienced with their products.

Tomcat is Apache not SUN, but besides that ...

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

What Sun needed to do (and has failed at, badly), is to create Java-based
sotfware they could charge for: if not software license, then support and
consulting. In the J2EE server realm, for instance, the only thing that
prevented Sun's various server offerings from being players as big as
WebSphere or Weblogic was incompetence.

Does anybody remember the review of SUN's app server on TSS several
years ago ?

(it is no longer available - SUN must have gotten TSS to remove it)

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Keep acquiring companies until you own four or five different web servers.
Choose among them for political rather than technical reasons. Be sure to
pick the one maintained by people who in six months can leave with large
stock grants fully vested.

That may apply to some of the NetScape server side stuff.

But I don't think it matches with Java, Java IDE and Java app server.

Arne

 

[cbossens73]

On Apr 18, 6:31 am, "Mike Schilling" <[email protected]>
wrote:
....

1i. There's no money to be made in IDEs.

I agree that for a company that has a market cap
of $3bn the revenues from an IDE probably wouldn't
make a dent but the founders (in 2000) of:

www.jetbrains.com

are laughing all the way to the bank.

And their employees are probably disagreeing
with your statement to.

They are selling $599 commercial licence of
IntelliJ IDEA like pancakes and for me it's
a no-brainer.

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

What Sun needed to do (and has failed at, badly), is to create Java-based
sotfware they could charge for: if not software license, then support and
consulting. In the J2EE server realm, for instance, the only thing that
prevented Sun's various server offerings from being players as big as
WebSphere or Weblogic was incompetence.

There is also this perception that Sun J2EE servers are
reference/teaching servers, that they are not scalable, that they are
somehow less reliable (presumably more buggy and less production-ready),
and so forth.

It's rather odd, because I've had to use iPlanet, Orion, oc4j (the
Oracle version of the previous), WebSphere, and iPlanet in production
settings, and each and every one of them has had as many issues as using
Sun's RI (currently still an RI, but the App Server and Glassfish are
pretty close).

Of course this is in the usual environment where the people making the
final server decisions often don't have much technical background. They
just convince themselves that they need big iron (Hey, we might have as
many as several dozen concurrent users...we need an enterprise server,
that kind of thing), and they've also heard that Sun falls short in that
regard, so they end up buying expensive crap which is just as bad.

But clearly Sun could have promoted their products better. I know I've
heard the refrain about the RI right from when it first appeared - that
it was buggy and sluggish - and Sun must have been aware that developers
were saying this. This pollutes the perception of every other server
product they have. And Sun really did nothing to address these perceptions.

AHS

 

[Qu0ll]

That may apply to some of the NetScape server side stuff.

But I don't think it matches with Java, Java IDE and Java app server.

1i. There's no money to be made in IDEs.
1ii. One of the few things Sun does that is widely used is NetBeans, in
which, as part i relates, there is no money to be made. [a]
2. iPlanet was a J2EE server.

a) Though Sun did for a time harbor the fantasy that they could sell
"advanced" NetBeans add-ons, back in the days when it was still called
"Forte for Java".

If Sun sold NetBeans on a subscription basis they would probably do very
well. Same goes for GlassFish.

--
And loving it,

-Qu0ll (Rare, not extinct)
_________________________________________________
(e-mail address removed)
[Replace the "SixFour" with numbers to email me]

 

[Mark Space]

They are selling $599 commercial licence of
IntelliJ IDEA like pancakes and for me it's
a no-brainer.

Just curious: by "no-brainer" do you mean you are a customer? I'm
curious what could be the advantage of a $599 piece of software, esp if
that's per seat.

 

[Mike Schilling]

On Apr 18, 6:31 am, "Mike Schilling" <[email protected]>
wrote:
...

I agree that for a company that has a market cap
of $3bn the revenues from an IDE probably wouldn't
make a dent but the founders (in 2000) of:

www.jetbrains.com

are laughing all the way to the bank.

And their employees are probably disagreeing
with your statement to.

They are selling $599 commercial licence of
IntelliJ IDEA like pancakes and for me it's
a no-brainer.

You're right; I menat "no money" for a company the size of Sun. It
does help that IntelliJ is an amazing product; it has to be to compete
with freeware like Eclipse.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

That may apply to some of the NetScape server side stuff.

But I don't think it matches with Java, Java IDE and Java app
server.

1i. There's no money to be made in IDEs.
1ii. One of the few things Sun does that is widely used is NetBeans,
in which, as part i relates, there is no money to be made. [a]
2. iPlanet was a J2EE server.

I thougth iPlanet was a web server with the capability for scripting
via NSAPI.

But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPlanet explains that it was actually
a lot of things - including a Java EE app server.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

On Apr 18, 6:31 am, "Mike Schilling" <[email protected]>
wrote:
...

I agree that for a company that has a market cap
of $3bn the revenues from an IDE probably wouldn't
make a dent but the founders (in 2000) of:

www.jetbrains.com

are laughing all the way to the bank.

And their employees are probably disagreeing
with your statement to.

They are selling $599 commercial licence of
IntelliJ IDEA like pancakes and for me it's
a no-brainer.

They are quote successful.

But it is a rather small niche. Not anything that
will be able to impact SUN financials.

The huge majority is not willing to pay for an IDE today.

And even though JetBrains are successful today, then
the tide could turn very quickly, if suddenly they were
unable to stay ahead of the competition. And I am somewhat
skeptical about whether it will be possible to keep coming
up with new ideas for IDE's that the programmers will
actually be interested in.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Mike Schilling wrote:
Mark Space wrote:
Mike Schilling wrote:
In the J2EE server realm, for instance, the only thing that
prevented Sun's various server offerings from being players as big
as WebSphere or Weblogic was incompetence.

Yeah that's my impression too. I have no idea how Sun managed to
flub that one.

Keep acquiring companies until you own four or five different web
servers. Choose among them for political rather than technical
reasons. Be sure to pick the one maintained by people who in six
months can leave with large stock grants fully vested.

That may apply to some of the NetScape server side stuff.

But I don't think it matches with Java, Java IDE and Java app server.

1i. There's no money to be made in IDEs.
1ii. One of the few things Sun does that is widely used is NetBeans,
in which, as part i relates, there is no money to be made. [a]
2. iPlanet was a J2EE server.

a) Though Sun did for a time harbor the fantasy that they could sell
"advanced" NetBeans add-ons, back in the days when it was still called
"Forte for Java".

If Sun sold NetBeans on a subscription basis they would probably do very
well. Same goes for GlassFish.

Why do you think that?

It did not sell well when they did try to sell previous SUN app servers
and Forte for Java (which was NetBeans).

And since you have the legal right to distribute the source code
for both products to everyone for free due to GPL license, then
it would be impossible to market today.

Arne

 

[David Segall]

The sooner Sun starts charging for its open-source products and services the
better IMHO.

I disagree but perhaps Sun is listening to you. I believed they would
change the MySQL license to their open source one but they have
retained the restrictive MySQL distribution license.