Wednesday, March 18, 2009

IBM to Acquire Sun

Whoa! My world was rocked today when I picked up the NY Times and read about yet another decline in the stock market. Even more upsetting is that Sun Microsystems is in talks with IBM to be acquired.

This acquisition shouldn't really be all that upsetting. It does make perfect sense for IBM, which has always prided itself on its servers, to want to acquire the other technology company who also pride themselves on their servers. I'm sure that those two companies have competed head-to-head for years.

Sun is also the founding company of Java Technology which IBM is now heavily invested in. IBM has shown a lot of commitment to Open Source over the years with their development of a major OSS IDE called Eclipse and their endorsement of Novel's SUSE on the desktop and Red Hat for servers. So, when Sun Open Sourced Java, that most probably made Sun that much more of a desirable acquisition target to IBM.

The Sun blade servers have always been very respectable hardware from an engineering standpoint so I hope that IBM doesn't just retire the line to get it out of the way of their own similar offerings.

Maybe what is really the most upsetting part of this news for me is to have to see Scott McNealy down play his hot headed nature to be more compatible with IBM's more staid Sam Palmisano.

Or maybe it's the fact that the article clearly ties the reasoning behind this move to the faltering economy.

April Update: It looks like IBM has withdrawn its offer for now.