CNET News: Sun on Linux: What, Me Worry?

“When Sun Microsystems got started in 1982, companies such as
Wang and Data General dominated the hardware business. In less than
a decade, this upstart Unix outfit was a billion-dollar-plus phenom
while the once-mighty minicomputer makers had been consigned to
irrelevance.

“Such is the impact of what Harvard Business School professor
Clayton Christensen calls a disruptive technology. Sun, which won
IT converts by offering minicomputer customers less expensive and
less proprietary systems, had come up with a technology-price
recipe that the incumbents could not match.

“How times have changed nearly two decades later, with Sun now
the one scrambling to remain relevant. As the Unix server market
continues to shrink, sales of Intel-based servers running the Linux
operating system nearly doubled in the fourth quarter of 2002 from
a year earlier…”

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