Is anyone concerned about how such a merger might be for the public? (I can't decide how I feel about that.)
A defining feature of the computer industry is how a company with a lot of power can completely control the market and prevent new entries into that market. What offsets this nicely is the fast rate of change in the type of tasks that computers are used for. If it weren't for that change, the centralized power would be much more problematic.
So what I'm wondering is if that rate of change will ever slow down for relatively static portions of the market. If that happens, then I'd prefer to have more competition rather than less.
For instance, word processors have stagnated, partially because it is a relatively"known" field at this point and also because of MS's monopoly position. Wouldn't it have been great if multiple companies had survived and conformed to industry wide standards?
This is the type of thing which should be pondered when considering a Sun / IBM merger. 20 years from now, will the corporate systems they specialize in have stagnated due to lack of competition?
How many other players are in the same league? Oracle, SAP, Sun, IBM...
It seems like the list gets shorter each year.
Wall Street has been pushing consolidation in all industries for the past 8 years. It's proven to work out for those willing to skim and bailout, but that's it.
Free Enterprise and True Capitalism we do not possess or we'd have enforcement that there be ceilings in conglomerates for the sake of preserving competition and choice, ultimately leaving the decision in the hands of the Consumer.
So much for the Ma Bell breakup. They signaled it was all show when they break them up into 12 regional bells but make them regional monopolies. How people thought that was a sound solution staggers the imagination.
The same for the Oil Industry, the Auto Industry, the Aerospace/Commercial Airplane Manufacturing Industries, the Banking Industry, the Shipping Industry, etc, proves they care not for competition and choice.
History aside, I never understood why Apple & IBM didn't partner up during the PPC era with IBM licensing the OS and Apple licensing the Lotus suite. IBM could have been Apple's foot in the door to IT and the Enterprise full blown, and a ready market for IBM's own chips that would have made the development cost worthwhile. Such a collaboration would have given IBM a first class desktop OS, Apple a first class network ready business suite and an expanded market for both that might have successfully competed against MS & Intel.
Apple doesn't "get" the Enterprise but they do "get" graphics which is why I think it would be easier to spend 5 billion in developing their own CS suite versus buy Adobe.
Apple and Adobe have different ways of accomplishing things. I love to see them battle it out as they bring the best out of each other.
I guess you could try to rebuild CS from scratch but it's not just the cost...it's building one in good enough in the first rev that if Adobe uses the nuclear option (aka stop support Apple) you aren't suddently screwed.
It's also a bit like trying to replicate MS Office. Good luck with that even with a huge warchest.
History aside, I never understood why Apple & IBM didn't partner up during the PPC era with IBM licensing the OS and Apple licensing the Lotus suite. IBM could have been Apple's foot in the door to IT and the Enterprise full blown, and a ready market for IBM's own chips that would have made the development cost worthwhile. Such a collaboration would have given IBM a first class desktop OS, Apple a first class network ready business suite and an expanded market for both that might have successfully competed against MS & Intel.
Not so much with a joint office product, but in all other areas the whole thing collapsed.
Tried? Or played at it? Big difference.
IBM never took its own chip technology seriously on the desktop. Not only the half baked and never used CHRP, but all along, IBM had that opportunity. It was demonstrated repeatedly that Apple's own market share in consumer space was not enough to provide incentive for or to cover the development cost of PPC on the desktop. IBM had the customers and the infrastructure to do it, but not the competitive OS to run its Office suite on its own hardware. They made lots of noise about PPC taking over ... but that was all it was .. noise.
From what I understand, while OS X is an excellent consumer operating system, it isn't that great as a server OS.
Crazy talk. LOL. :-p
If you take away Apple, you are left with unix. Umm. Huge.
Apple server is great especially compared to win server 03 which is what everyone else has.
Of course there is AD which help both sides. RD works on mac and pc.
If Apple pushed it , especially that osx works well in controling remotly pcs, apple could be 20% larger in a year. It really is that good. Some weaknesses, ala podcast server won't meta tag soyou can search for relevance but advance server is pretty dope.
I agree 101%. LOL. Exactly what I meant. apple alive due to consumer devices ala iPod. That said, remember when Apple took on Avid with fcp or pro tools with logic i also remember Adobe was so upset with Apple they released a version fir pc only Apple stepped on a lot ot of big boy pro apps bu then Apple departed from this ans went after the finsumer market
If the gi after pro apps, they could in theory, build workstations that take on Avid and ithers
Hope so
Tired and typed in iphone. Not awake enough to check fir grammer/spelling :-)
or
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmurchison
Let's be real though. Apple's consumer success has been parlayed from a hail mary TD from the iPod.
If the iPod doesn't turn out to become a billion dollar success there's no iPhone. We should all be thanking Tony Fadell for saving Apple. Every bit of consumer success for Apple stems from iPod origin which is why I still think Apple's long term success is tenuous. Consumers are fickle...they'll have an iPhone for one contract an then move on to a new phone for the next contract.
I can't assume that Apple has these customer locked in for any significant time. Enterprise however takes a lot longer to turn. Few places can sustain a "rip and replace" upheaval.
I think Sun would merge with Apple for less money than IBM, Cisco or whoever well pay. I agree with MDriftmeyer that Apple keeps the best of the best of Sun employees in a merger and develops a two headed Hydra approach.
Sun engineers get certified in OS X and handle some of the Pro Applecare stuff.
No. You replace OS X server with Solaris and slap Cocoa and the UI on top of Solaris for a big win.
Running OSX on Sun's "big iron" would be funny to watch as long as it wasn't YOUR server.
Wrong. You extend Distributed Objects so that Solaris and OS X Server interoperate with PDO. Both have ZFS native and you put Solaris to handle the big data pools with advanced tools from OS X Server to be the top level which overseas those horses.
Openstep for Solaris was already done and shelved. Doing it again is a 2 year waste of time. We're talking about leveraging the big iron systems and with management tools from OS X Server you can just treat them as nodes on the grid.
That way the Financial Industries, Oil Industries, etc., retain their investments and the iPhone and it's other mobile devices "just work" within those enterprises via interfacing with OS X Server. Server hides all the hairiness and makes it simple to extend into the fields OS X kills Solaris in without Solaris being an ugly stepchild dressed in OS X UI. It's the backend tools that will be managed.
Sun as the subsidiary continues on with renewed ideas and goals, while being able to provide more compelling system designs [Apple Industrial Design] making those systems attractive once again.
Wrong. You extend Distributed Objects so that Solaris and OS X Server interoperate with PDO. Both have ZFS native and you put Solaris to handle the big data pools with advanced tools from OS X Server to be the top level which overseas those horses.
Openstep for Solaris was already done and shelved. Doing it again is a 2 year waste of time. We're talking about leveraging the big iron systems and with management tools from OS X Server you can just treat them as nodes on the grid.
Solaris is simply a better server OS than OSX. If you replace the userland and desktop with the one from OSX there isn't any "ugly stepchild" aspect of Solaris.
Openstep for Solaris should never have been shelved. Had Sun not done such a daft thing they'd be in far better shape today vis a vis Linux. Arguably it would be better than OSX/mach for the Mac Pro.
Why have three products (OSX, OSX Server and Solaris) when you can just have OSX (Mach based) and OSX Server (Solaris based). What does OSX Server as an OS solve that OSX Desktop doesn't for low end servers and workstations?
Solaris on the other hand has been optimized for 24x7 mission critical 16-way quad core+ boxes. For example, they've spent a ton of effort on the LWP threading model. This is one reason I believe that Solaris with OSX/Cocoa on top would be better for the Mac Pro as we move to more and more cores.
Any existing OSX Server management tools should be a reasonably easy to port to Solaris (x86 or sparc). Even today, you could modify those tools to manage a set of Solaris servers but there's no reason to...and why even merge companies at that point if that was your "big iron" strategy? They aren't just compute nodes on a grid.
If Apple were to aquire SUN I fear they would replace Solaris with OS X Server & just merge key technologies, something that in effect may not put them in a much better place technology wise to attack the enterprise market.
All that being said though they would also be buying customers if they bought SUN & this could give them a well enough boost into the enterprise market that people might actually stop laughing at the thought of Apple in enterprise.
I would love to see Apple go enterprise, but as awesome as Leopard Server is it still has many shortfalls in management when compared to AD. You can't simplify everything in enterprise, this is the one area that you actually need to offer crazy range of flexibility.
I agree with the danger of acquiring Sun... there'd be no point just merging the technologies into Apple. A successful purchase of Sun would have to keep a distinctly different, enterprise focussed computer company. Apple is VERY focussed on everything consumer and has done a great job, but it's weakness is probably that it focusses very closely on a few key areas.
I actually think a high partial ownership of Sun would be better than 100% ownership.
An Apple Enterprise division with its own (mostly) independent management, and its own focus - leveraging Apple's existing products as much as possible and building its own where needed, 100% committed to enterprise needs.
Solaris is simply a better server OS than OSX. If you replace the userland and desktop with the one from OSX there isn't any "ugly stepchild" aspect of Solaris.
Openstep for Solaris should never have been shelved. Had Sun not done such a daft thing they'd be in far better shape today vis a vis Linux. Arguably it would be better than OSX/mach for the Mac Pro.
Why have three products (OSX, OSX Server and Solaris) when you can just have OSX (Mach based) and OSX Server (Solaris based). What does OSX Server as an OS solve that OSX Desktop doesn't for low end servers and workstations?
Solaris on the other hand has been optimized for 24x7 mission critical 16-way quad core+ boxes. For example, they've spent a ton of effort on the LWP threading model. This is one reason I believe that Solaris with OSX/Cocoa on top would be better for the Mac Pro as we move to more and more cores.
Any existing OSX Server management tools should be a reasonably easy to port to Solaris (x86 or sparc). Even today, you could modify those tools to manage a set of Solaris servers but there's no reason to...and why even merge companies at that point if that was your "big iron" strategy? They aren't just compute nodes on a grid.
The entire Solaris messaging system and kernel are not on the same page as the direction of OS X/OS X Server. This was part of the reason that the 2 years to port Openstep onto Solaris was such a pain in the ass, never mind the political infighting.
I can't answer your questions about what OS X Server solves over OS X for small-to-mid-size enterprises without you having worked with Server.
The point for Apple would be to get a serious foothold into the Enterprise, while keeping the backend Solaris and the front-end for heterogeneous environments being OS X, where OS X Server manages both ends.
iBM wants MySQL, just like it wanted Informix. It wants to consolidate the database space and go against Oracle. Such consolidation is not healthy for the industry because then it's a juggernaut for Federal projects, Wall Street, heavy industry.
To IBM they want to leverage Sun to get their big iron back into the Enterprise.
With Cisco going all out for Rack Servers IBM sees their partnerships taking bites out of their traditional markets. They'll try to put a big cog in the direction of this and dictate much of what the ERP markets will manage.
Oracle won't put up for squat and go after SAP and create not innovation, but congestion.
From an investor point of view, IBM is a crappy answer. From an innovation point of view, Apple housing Sun as a subsidiary has many attractive roadmap possibilities.
Finally: Until OS X 10.6/ OS X Server 10.6 arrives we really won't see the direction Apple has for the mid-to-enterprise markets.
The entire Solaris messaging system and kernel are not on the same page as the direction of OS X/OS X Server. This was part of the reason that the 2 years to port Openstep onto Solaris was such a pain in the ass, never mind the political infighting.
Yes, arguably a superios direction when it comes to n-way multiprocessors.
Quote:
I can't answer your questions about what OS X Server solves over OS X for small-to-mid-size enterprises without you having worked with Server.
Right. So tell me how performant OS X Server is with 16 quad core machines...
Quote:
iBM wants MySQL, just like it wanted Informix. It wants to consolidate the database space and go against Oracle. Such consolidation is not healthy for the industry because then it's a juggernaut for Federal projects, Wall Street, heavy industry.
MySQL is GPL'd. Sure IBM can derive some minor advantage with it but the effect of open source is the commoditization of basic capabilities (OS, DB, etc). MySQL, other than price, has little advantage over other DBMS. I'd rather use PostgreSQL, SQLServer or Oracle in that order.
Quote:
To IBM they want to leverage Sun to get their big iron back into the Enterprise.
When did IBM big iron ever leave the enterprise? Heck, you can even run OpenSolaris on their zSeries mainframes if you want.
Quote:
From an investor point of view, IBM is a crappy answer. From an innovation point of view, Apple housing Sun as a subsidiary has many attractive roadmap possibilities.
Comments
Is anyone concerned about how such a merger might be for the public? (I can't decide how I feel about that.)
A defining feature of the computer industry is how a company with a lot of power can completely control the market and prevent new entries into that market. What offsets this nicely is the fast rate of change in the type of tasks that computers are used for. If it weren't for that change, the centralized power would be much more problematic.
So what I'm wondering is if that rate of change will ever slow down for relatively static portions of the market. If that happens, then I'd prefer to have more competition rather than less.
For instance, word processors have stagnated, partially because it is a relatively"known" field at this point and also because of MS's monopoly position. Wouldn't it have been great if multiple companies had survived and conformed to industry wide standards?
This is the type of thing which should be pondered when considering a Sun / IBM merger. 20 years from now, will the corporate systems they specialize in have stagnated due to lack of competition?
How many other players are in the same league? Oracle, SAP, Sun, IBM...
It seems like the list gets shorter each year.
Wall Street has been pushing consolidation in all industries for the past 8 years. It's proven to work out for those willing to skim and bailout, but that's it.
Free Enterprise and True Capitalism we do not possess or we'd have enforcement that there be ceilings in conglomerates for the sake of preserving competition and choice, ultimately leaving the decision in the hands of the Consumer.
So much for the Ma Bell breakup. They signaled it was all show when they break them up into 12 regional bells but make them regional monopolies. How people thought that was a sound solution staggers the imagination.
The same for the Oil Industry, the Auto Industry, the Aerospace/Commercial Airplane Manufacturing Industries, the Banking Industry, the Shipping Industry, etc, proves they care not for competition and choice.
Apple doesn't "get" the Enterprise but they do "get" graphics which is why I think it would be easier to spend 5 billion in developing their own CS suite versus buy Adobe.
Apple and Adobe have different ways of accomplishing things. I love to see them battle it out as they bring the best out of each other.
I guess you could try to rebuild CS from scratch but it's not just the cost...it's building one in good enough in the first rev that if Adobe uses the nuclear option (aka stop support Apple) you aren't suddently screwed.
It's also a bit like trying to replicate MS Office. Good luck with that even with a huge warchest.
History aside, I never understood why Apple & IBM didn't partner up during the PPC era with IBM licensing the OS and Apple licensing the Lotus suite. IBM could have been Apple's foot in the door to IT and the Enterprise full blown, and a ready market for IBM's own chips that would have made the development cost worthwhile. Such a collaboration would have given IBM a first class desktop OS, Apple a first class network ready business suite and an expanded market for both that might have successfully competed against MS & Intel.
They tried and failed on multiple levels.
Not so much with a joint office product, but in all other areas the whole thing collapsed.
They tried and failed on multiple levels.
Not so much with a joint office product, but in all other areas the whole thing collapsed.
Tried? Or played at it? Big difference.
IBM never took its own chip technology seriously on the desktop. Not only the half baked and never used CHRP, but all along, IBM had that opportunity. It was demonstrated repeatedly that Apple's own market share in consumer space was not enough to provide incentive for or to cover the development cost of PPC on the desktop. IBM had the customers and the infrastructure to do it, but not the competitive OS to run its Office suite on its own hardware. They made lots of noise about PPC taking over ... but that was all it was .. noise.
From what I understand, while OS X is an excellent consumer operating system, it isn't that great as a server OS.
Crazy talk. LOL. :-p
If you take away Apple, you are left with unix. Umm. Huge.
Apple server is great especially compared to win server 03 which is what everyone else has.
Of course there is AD which help both sides. RD works on mac and pc.
If Apple pushed it , especially that osx works well in controling remotly pcs, apple could be 20% larger in a year. It really is that good. Some weaknesses, ala podcast server won't meta tag soyou can search for relevance but advance server is pretty dope.
If the gi after pro apps, they could in theory, build workstations that take on Avid and ithers
Hope so
Tired and typed in iphone. Not awake enough to check fir grammer/spelling :-)
or
Let's be real though. Apple's consumer success has been parlayed from a hail mary TD from the iPod.
If the iPod doesn't turn out to become a billion dollar success there's no iPhone. We should all be thanking Tony Fadell for saving Apple. Every bit of consumer success for Apple stems from iPod origin which is why I still think Apple's long term success is tenuous. Consumers are fickle...they'll have an iPhone for one contract an then move on to a new phone for the next contract.
I can't assume that Apple has these customer locked in for any significant time. Enterprise however takes a lot longer to turn. Few places can sustain a "rip and replace" upheaval.
I think Sun would merge with Apple for less money than IBM, Cisco or whoever well pay. I agree with MDriftmeyer that Apple keeps the best of the best of Sun employees in a merger and develops a two headed Hydra approach.
Sun engineers get certified in OS X and handle some of the Pro Applecare stuff.
No. You replace OS X server with Solaris and slap Cocoa and the UI on top of Solaris for a big win.
Running OSX on Sun's "big iron" would be funny to watch as long as it wasn't YOUR server.
Wrong. You extend Distributed Objects so that Solaris and OS X Server interoperate with PDO. Both have ZFS native and you put Solaris to handle the big data pools with advanced tools from OS X Server to be the top level which overseas those horses.
Openstep for Solaris was already done and shelved. Doing it again is a 2 year waste of time. We're talking about leveraging the big iron systems and with management tools from OS X Server you can just treat them as nodes on the grid.
That way the Financial Industries, Oil Industries, etc., retain their investments and the iPhone and it's other mobile devices "just work" within those enterprises via interfacing with OS X Server. Server hides all the hairiness and makes it simple to extend into the fields OS X kills Solaris in without Solaris being an ugly stepchild dressed in OS X UI. It's the backend tools that will be managed.
Sun as the subsidiary continues on with renewed ideas and goals, while being able to provide more compelling system designs [Apple Industrial Design] making those systems attractive once again.
Wrong. You extend Distributed Objects so that Solaris and OS X Server interoperate with PDO. Both have ZFS native and you put Solaris to handle the big data pools with advanced tools from OS X Server to be the top level which overseas those horses.
Openstep for Solaris was already done and shelved. Doing it again is a 2 year waste of time. We're talking about leveraging the big iron systems and with management tools from OS X Server you can just treat them as nodes on the grid.
Solaris is simply a better server OS than OSX. If you replace the userland and desktop with the one from OSX there isn't any "ugly stepchild" aspect of Solaris.
Openstep for Solaris should never have been shelved. Had Sun not done such a daft thing they'd be in far better shape today vis a vis Linux. Arguably it would be better than OSX/mach for the Mac Pro.
Why have three products (OSX, OSX Server and Solaris) when you can just have OSX (Mach based) and OSX Server (Solaris based). What does OSX Server as an OS solve that OSX Desktop doesn't for low end servers and workstations?
Solaris on the other hand has been optimized for 24x7 mission critical 16-way quad core+ boxes. For example, they've spent a ton of effort on the LWP threading model. This is one reason I believe that Solaris with OSX/Cocoa on top would be better for the Mac Pro as we move to more and more cores.
Any existing OSX Server management tools should be a reasonably easy to port to Solaris (x86 or sparc). Even today, you could modify those tools to manage a set of Solaris servers but there's no reason to...and why even merge companies at that point if that was your "big iron" strategy? They aren't just compute nodes on a grid.
If Apple were to aquire SUN I fear they would replace Solaris with OS X Server & just merge key technologies, something that in effect may not put them in a much better place technology wise to attack the enterprise market.
All that being said though they would also be buying customers if they bought SUN & this could give them a well enough boost into the enterprise market that people might actually stop laughing at the thought of Apple in enterprise.
I would love to see Apple go enterprise, but as awesome as Leopard Server is it still has many shortfalls in management when compared to AD. You can't simplify everything in enterprise, this is the one area that you actually need to offer crazy range of flexibility.
I agree with the danger of acquiring Sun... there'd be no point just merging the technologies into Apple. A successful purchase of Sun would have to keep a distinctly different, enterprise focussed computer company. Apple is VERY focussed on everything consumer and has done a great job, but it's weakness is probably that it focusses very closely on a few key areas.
I actually think a high partial ownership of Sun would be better than 100% ownership.
An Apple Enterprise division with its own (mostly) independent management, and its own focus - leveraging Apple's existing products as much as possible and building its own where needed, 100% committed to enterprise needs.
Solaris is simply a better server OS than OSX. If you replace the userland and desktop with the one from OSX there isn't any "ugly stepchild" aspect of Solaris.
Openstep for Solaris should never have been shelved. Had Sun not done such a daft thing they'd be in far better shape today vis a vis Linux. Arguably it would be better than OSX/mach for the Mac Pro.
Why have three products (OSX, OSX Server and Solaris) when you can just have OSX (Mach based) and OSX Server (Solaris based). What does OSX Server as an OS solve that OSX Desktop doesn't for low end servers and workstations?
Solaris on the other hand has been optimized for 24x7 mission critical 16-way quad core+ boxes. For example, they've spent a ton of effort on the LWP threading model. This is one reason I believe that Solaris with OSX/Cocoa on top would be better for the Mac Pro as we move to more and more cores.
Any existing OSX Server management tools should be a reasonably easy to port to Solaris (x86 or sparc). Even today, you could modify those tools to manage a set of Solaris servers but there's no reason to...and why even merge companies at that point if that was your "big iron" strategy? They aren't just compute nodes on a grid.
The entire Solaris messaging system and kernel are not on the same page as the direction of OS X/OS X Server. This was part of the reason that the 2 years to port Openstep onto Solaris was such a pain in the ass, never mind the political infighting.
I can't answer your questions about what OS X Server solves over OS X for small-to-mid-size enterprises without you having worked with Server.
The point for Apple would be to get a serious foothold into the Enterprise, while keeping the backend Solaris and the front-end for heterogeneous environments being OS X, where OS X Server manages both ends.
iBM wants MySQL, just like it wanted Informix. It wants to consolidate the database space and go against Oracle. Such consolidation is not healthy for the industry because then it's a juggernaut for Federal projects, Wall Street, heavy industry.
To IBM they want to leverage Sun to get their big iron back into the Enterprise.
With Cisco going all out for Rack Servers IBM sees their partnerships taking bites out of their traditional markets. They'll try to put a big cog in the direction of this and dictate much of what the ERP markets will manage.
Oracle won't put up for squat and go after SAP and create not innovation, but congestion.
From an investor point of view, IBM is a crappy answer. From an innovation point of view, Apple housing Sun as a subsidiary has many attractive roadmap possibilities.
Finally: Until OS X 10.6/ OS X Server 10.6 arrives we really won't see the direction Apple has for the mid-to-enterprise markets.
The entire Solaris messaging system and kernel are not on the same page as the direction of OS X/OS X Server. This was part of the reason that the 2 years to port Openstep onto Solaris was such a pain in the ass, never mind the political infighting.
Yes, arguably a superios direction when it comes to n-way multiprocessors.
I can't answer your questions about what OS X Server solves over OS X for small-to-mid-size enterprises without you having worked with Server.
Right. So tell me how performant OS X Server is with 16 quad core machines...
iBM wants MySQL, just like it wanted Informix. It wants to consolidate the database space and go against Oracle. Such consolidation is not healthy for the industry because then it's a juggernaut for Federal projects, Wall Street, heavy industry.
MySQL is GPL'd. Sure IBM can derive some minor advantage with it but the effect of open source is the commoditization of basic capabilities (OS, DB, etc). MySQL, other than price, has little advantage over other DBMS. I'd rather use PostgreSQL, SQLServer or Oracle in that order.
To IBM they want to leverage Sun to get their big iron back into the Enterprise.
When did IBM big iron ever leave the enterprise? Heck, you can even run OpenSolaris on their zSeries mainframes if you want.
From an investor point of view, IBM is a crappy answer. From an innovation point of view, Apple housing Sun as a subsidiary has many attractive roadmap possibilities.
We agree here.