InfoWorld: Method to its Madness

“As the United States enters the post-bubble, late-recession,
prewar (as I write this) economy, one of IT’s biggest money
machines, Sun Microsystems, is lobbying to sell you something.
Anything. They’ve got your big monolithic server, your little
$1,000 Sparc server, your blade server, and your rack-mountable PC.
They despise Intel, but you can stuff Sun-branded x86 blades into
Sun’s new blade chassis. Sun’s big on Solaris, but they’re just as
big on Linux, and they’ll grudgingly embrace the existing Windows
servers in your datacenter. J2EE? Sun’s got that. A slide from the
Feb. 10 Network Computing 03 press conference lists the cost of
software for a Sun 12-processor server as $0, which must be the
permanent price tag for Solaris 9 and Sun ONE (Open Network
Environment). And finally, Sun’s new N1 Provisioning Server makes
network configuration so easy that one guy running a Web browser
can do the work of a whole IS team. Sun is simultaneously
eliminating complexity and building up its services offerings to
outsource the complexity it’s eliminating.

“Competitors will portray Sun’s moves as desperate. I don’t
think Sun would deny that. Was there ever a better time for a
technology company to pull out all the stops? If IBM,
Hewlett-Packard, or Microsoft chuckle at Sun’s mad R&D
scramble, customers should ask Sun’s competitors why they’re not
doing the same thing…”

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