“The epic battle between Microsoft Corp. and Sun
Microsystems Inc. for the enterprise is coming to a head. With
Microsoft set to launch Windows 2000 next month, Sun last week said
it will offer its Solaris 8 operating system for free.”
” ‘The price of Solaris is built in to the hardware anyway, so
it’s meaningless,’ said Chris Ray, a Windows 2000 program manager
at Microsoft. Sun charges three times more what a customer can buy
in a comparable Windows 2000 system,’ he said. ‘They have a lot of
room to give away the operating system for free when they’re
charging that much for hardware.’ “
“Sun is playing catch-up since IBM has bundled AIX essentially
free with its RS6000 servers for years, said Miles Barel, program
director for IBM’s Unix marketing. But other company executives
said they have not yet worked out pricing for IBM’s upcoming 64-bit
Monterey operating system, which will, like Solaris 8, run on Intel
boxes. “How that will work has yet to be established,” Barel
said.”