The announcement that Sun Microsystems was purchasing Cobalt Networks for $2 billion dollars caught me completely by surprise. I immediately thought, “What a brilliant move for Sun! Why hadn’t I thought of this earlier?”
The announcement that Sun Microsystems was purchasing Cobalt Networks for $2 billion dollars caught me completely by surprise. I immediately thought, “What a brilliant move for Sun! Why hadn’t I thought of this earlier?”
Sun was the first company to truly understand the power of networking and the Internet, and they have managed to fend off nearly every competitor for the past five to ten years.
However, they are constantly facing threats to the lower-end of their market. In the mid-90s, the threat was Windows NT. While NT did capture an enormous share of the workstation market, it never gained the traction it needed in the server market. Sun responded by selling more high-end servers. You are now much more likely to see Sun pitting its Starfire servers against IBM’s mainframes than worrying about NT workstations.
Today’s threats to Sun’s market come from places outside of Redmond, WA. As Michael Dell put it in our August 2000 interview with him, “[Sun has] an incredible investment in this proprietary software platform and hardware stack, and I think that’s going to become increasingly difficult to maintain…We’re going to pass Sun in the [server business], and we are not going to do it with a proprietary Unix. Linux is playing a big part in the strategy.”
So Sun figured out a way to take advantage of Linux, reclaim a big stake in the lower-end of the Unix server market, and patch…
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