“A simmering feud between the two over an effort to bring Sun’s
Solaris operating system to servers running Intel’s upcoming
Itanium processor has now burst into the open. Intel said today
that Sun hasn’t been pulling its weight in the partnership and that
Intel will drastically reduce the resources it’s devoting to the
effort.”
“Though Intel still has strong hardware support, the number of
operating systems planned for IA-64 computers has been dropping.
SGI backed Linux instead of its in-house variant of Unix. Compaq
dropped plans to have its own Tru64 Unix run on IA-64. And IBM and
Santa Cruz Operations teamed up their two efforts into a single
software package called Monterey-64.”
“The arrival of the Linux operating system freed Intel from
its dependence on Sun, [Robert Francis Group analyst Cal]
Braunstein said. ‘Now with Linux coming aboard and everybody buying
into Linux as the next big wave here, I think Intel feels they now
can put adequate pressure on Sun to say, ‘You may have to
reconsider your strategy,’ ‘ Braunstein said.”