"With a Linux strategy like you describe, Sun may lose more than they gain. Their hardware sales are bread and butter, but they are dropping substantially every quarter. They have already dropped nearly 40% from 2001 to 2003, and they continue to lose market share. SPARC is uncompetitive, and they have minimal share in the x86 server space. Maybe you're right that Solaris is their last hope, but even after such a move, SUNW will be a very different company."
How much money do you think it takes them to maintain this R&D facility in Burlington, MA? It is a beautiful facility in an expensive place to do business.
I think Sun's CEO confirms my hypothesis of a Solaris everywhere strategy, though he doesn't go so far as to address IBM/HP non x86 systems directly.
...At Sun, as I said, it's tough to compete against a social movement, especially one in which we all believe. But compete against a single company, Red Hat? Finally. Now that Sun's Solaris operating system runs on Intel, AMD and Sparc systems, our customers have immense choice. We can deliver our products at a lower price point, we can deliver more and better features, more innovation, legendary security (the national security kind), and far better customer support and responsiveness - maybe not for a developer looking for real-time patches (yet), but certainly for the enterprise looking for an accountable vendor.
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