Sun, IBM, Machiavelli and William of Ockham
IBM and Sun have announced an agreement for IBM to resell Solaris on its x Series servers. Mark Webbink believes (and Matt Asay concurs) that this is a Machiavellian move on IBM’s part to keep other OS vendors on the defensive:
For IBM it provides another Unix-based operating system vendor with which to challenge Microsoft and with which to keep pressure on the other Unix-based operating system vendors, Red Hat and Novell.
Mark Webbink has been Red Hat’s top lawyer, so he clearly has had far more exposure to the top dogs in the software industry than I have, but I have a much simpler explanation for this move.
IBM wants to sell hardware.
I mean, jeez, we can read all kinds of portents from the entrails, but I’m with William of Ockham on this one. Sun is getting out of the hardware business, they have ported Solaris to the x86 platform, they have a very large user base with servers coming off warranty, their customers don’t want to have to port their applications, and IBM sells x86 servers. What could be simpler?
From the slashdotted article on the news:
Left out of the mix here is Hewlett-Packard, which is locked in a battle with IBM for leadership in the worldwide server market. IBM and HP each had 29 percent share in the most recent figures compiled by market tracker IDC, while Sun and Dell Inc. were tied for third with 11 percent each.
That’s the real news here. This raises lots of interesting questions — who has the upper hand competitively here? Did IBM get an exclusive, or are they only getting first-mover advantage? Could Sun say no to IBM’s demand for an exclusive reseller agreement? Could IBM afford to say no if Sun refused an exclusive? Did the negotiations come down to a term for an exclusivity deal? Was Sun shuttling back and forth between HP and IBM to get a better deal, or are there strategic reasons why they preferred IBM? And what about Dell? Not enough Unix experience?
These are the interesting aspects to this announcement, not its impact on Microsoft, Red Hat and Novell, in my arm’s length view. As much as we’d like to think the OS wars are the center of the universe, others have their own businesses to run.