The company IBM is currently negotiating a deal in which it will buy Sun Microsystems for the hefty sum of US$7 billion. The deal will be a very important one, and according to The NY Times could result in an anti-trust challenge.A combination of these two companies would create a new one, with an immense amount of money being spent on research and development. As you may know, IBM and Sun are both companies that invest heavily into developing new technologies, and if they merged, they would have a budget of around about $9 billion a year on R&D alone.
According to the NY Times, Sun's stock has gone up by $4.10 (82%) a share since the news was announced, and is expected to hit around $10 per share. This deal would be the largest in IBM's history, the largest before this one was $4.9B for the company Cognos. Also, "Together, I.B.M. and Sun would have about 65 percent of the market for server computers running the Unix operating system and 42 percent of the total server market, measured in the dollar value of the market."
This would be a huge event in the history of technology, so be sure to keep a look out for more news on this as it develops.
Really odd, had a job interview in their tech support a couple weeks ago, woulda been a nice discussion. o_O oh well. Frankly I'd love to see IBM back on their feet. Wish they'd make puters again.
Nothing would surprise me since Compaq acquired DEC. That was a real sad moment.
Back on their feet? Where did you get the impression that IBM is struggling? They didn't sell their PC division because they were hurting. They sold it because they couldn't be bothered with the peanuts it was worth to them compared to their server and supercomputer business.
This is the world's biggest research company, bar none. They file for more patents yearly than anyone else in the world. It didn't make sense for them to dwell on devalued consumer line crap.
Solaris is currently given away for personal and non-commercial use in the form of OpenSolaris (http://opensolaris.org); OpenSolaris also has a robust developer community of its own.
If Solaris/OpenSolaris competes with anyone, it's Linux and other flavors of UNIX, not Windows. What is really interesting is Sun's hardware business, especially the SPARC (not x86) end. While Sun's x86 business meshes quite well with IBM's services business, the SPARC business is built *entirely* around Solaris for SPARC, which is but a vestige of what it used to be (Sun's SPARC hardware business is practically a vestigal tail wagging a largely software/x86 dog).
The best Java VM - From IBM, will now be properly integrated with OpenJDK and official Java VM.
SWT vs Swing - Continue to coexist?
Java will finally be a much better Desktop Platform because of IBM.
One thing wont change, their website. Both Sun and IBM 's website are so hard to navigate.
This is very cool news.
ZDNet:When will IBM buy Sun?
had better not be the register... :o
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