“The Cobalt line, developed by a company Sun acquired and
including some products costing less than $1,000, will pit Sun
against personal computer makers who have concentrated on more
commodity-like machines such as Compaq and Dell. … Sun’s Cobalt
line runs the open Linux operating system, a departure from its
emphasis on a proprietary flavour of Unix known as Solaris, but
officials said the operating system was irrelevant to users that
did not intend to modify it.”
“Sun also introduced a low-end Solaris machine in the Netra
line, also starting at less than $1,000. Critics like competitor
International Business Machines say the move to Linux could
undermine Solaris.”
“But Sun officials said the appliance market would not
cannibalise its base of high end users, even though some of the
demand would come from large companies adding appliance servers for
ease of use.”