"When Jonathan Schwartz took the helm of Sun Microsystems in
April, it wasn't clear what kind of company he inherited--an
old-school vendor of expensive, proprietary systems, or an industry
stalwart revitalized around open source software and
standards-based hardware.
"After two quarters of solid sales growth, fueled by x86 and
Sparc servers and an open source version of its Solaris operating
system, Schwartz thinks the answer is now clear. 'The proprietary
and expensive moniker is now dead,' Schwartz wrote on his blog last
month. 'Dead dead dead.' And there's this significant factoid to
back him up: Sun recently bumped Dell out of the No. 3 spot in
server sales, behind IBM and Hewlett-Packard..."