IBM to buy Sun for $7 Billion?

[nonnus29]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090318/bs_nm/us_sunmicro_takeover_ibm

Shocking news to me at least.  Though it shouldn't be surprising give Sun's market capitalization at the moment.

What does a future with IBM mean for Sun?  Considering how open source friendly IBM is they could just open up all Sun products.

Oh, wait Sun already did that...   

IBM will have both Sparc and Powerpc chips now I guess.

[cylab]

I wonder what this would mean for their competing technologies. While I don't care about the hardware market and I can see some good chance to merge the JDKs, I doubt that IBM would maintain multiple application servers, windowing toolkits and IDEs in the long run. Would be a pity now that swing and netbeans are useable after all... :/

[Jackal von ÖRF]

Sun, whose name stands for Stanford University Network

I had never known that!

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Abuse]

Do you think IBM would offer greater backing for Java on the desktop?
I'm thinking not 

[nonnus29]

I wonder what this would mean for their competing technologies. While I don't care about the hardware market and I can see some good chance to merge the JDKs, I doubt that IBM would maintain multiple application servers, windowing toolkits and IDEs in the long run. Would be a pity now that swing and netbeans are useable after all... :/

That would be the worst case scenario imo.... 

Do you think IBM would offer greater backing for Java on the desktop?
I'm thinking not 

I disagree; IBM has given us Eclipse/SWT.  The Lotus sweet is using SWT now, etc...  Seems to me that IBM has been a big supporter of Java; desktop, server, etc... JavaDB -> Apache Derby was an IBM product "Cloudscape". IBM gave it to the Apache Foundation.

Sun owns MySQL now, how about DB2 vs MySQL? 

Interesting times...

[kevglass]

My experience of IBM through real life work is that they'd pay lip service to any aspects of Sun products or technologies that they didn't deem a immediately money making. I think that'd mean desktop and web based Java would take a hit since the money still seems to be in the enterprise.

IBM gave us Eclipse because they needed a platform to build enterprise tooling on. Don't think I've seen many consumer desktop/web based IBM products basedon Java.

More-over, they have their own variant of the VM (which is wonderfully optimised for thier hardware and software) which isn't very friendly to applets.

In general sounds like a good move for Sun's commercial stability, for enterprise Java, but probably not for us lot.

Kev

[kappa]

Doesn't sound too good, if someone was to buy sun i hope Google buys them, or at least the Java part
it'd be more useful to them than IBM and better for us as they are more consumer focused. </dream>

[Riven]

In general sounds like a good move for Sun's commercial stability, for enterprise Java, but probably not for us lot.

Well, in the end any 'enterprice feature' in the JVM - basically performance improvements - will be available to us all - and now that we have LWJGL OpenGL wrappers, which is IMHO the only way to release games on the market that stand a commercial chance**, we're pretty independant of what IBM might do to both Swing and AWT.


** That is debatable, but take a look at the current commercial Java games... it's all OpenGL.

[kevglass]

It's all OpenGL because of the lack investment in AWT/Swing for gaming uses! Would IBM make this better?

So, who would you like to buy Sun if it has to happen?

Google
Adobe
Dell
Cisco
Who else?

Kev

[nonnus29]

It's all OpenGL because of the lack investment in AWT/Swing for gaming uses! Would IBM make this better?

So, who would you like to buy Sun if it has to happen?

Google
Adobe
Dell
Cisco
Who else?

Kev

Google maybe but IBM seems like the only other company that has the same depth of product offerings: hardware, operating systems, databases, compilers, office suite, etc... Microsoft doesn't do hardware but matches well in other areas.  I doubt MS is looking to get into hardware.

Then there is Suns patent portfolio.

This is still early in the game though.  We may here other companies are sniffing around as well (ie this announcement was leaked intentionally to drive up the price?)

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[kappa]

It's all OpenGL because of the lack investment in AWT/Swing for gaming uses! Would IBM make this better?

So, who would you like to buy Sun if it has to happen?

Google
Adobe
Dell
Cisco
Who else?

Kev

Google and Adobe would be ideal especially for consumer java. (imagine a flash/java tag team)

Dell and HP are the next Largest after IBM in the world Server market, IDC stats

World Server Market Share
1. IBM 31.4%
2. H-P 29.5%
3. Dell 11.6%
4. Sun 10.6%

[Mr. Gol]

Although there has been a lot of talk about Sun's rather bad current state, this news still comes as a surprise for me. Like said by others, I'm afraid this will mean increased attention to everything enterprise related and reduced attention to the rest. Especially since the enterprise is where IBM is focused on, and is also the only place where Java shines.

[DzzD]

I am affraid.... 

[kevglass]

Oracle is also speculated as a contender in the WSJ article, much nicer idea.

Kev

[Mr_Light]

I'm not sure the mysql fan's will like that much.

Anyways I don't think any company can pay the amount of monney at this time that sun should demand for itself. And I don't mean can as in has the monney I mean can as in can sell it to their stockholders.

As far as I can tell theres just a lot of political nonsense going on - but don't invest your life savings based upon my opinions.

As far as dreams go I much rather see Sun turning into a private company

[appel]

I work in an old Enterprise IBM WebSphere environment and it's absolutely horrific! I rather use TEXTPAD to edit my files than this uber-slow WebSphere!

We're in the process of going into another IDE, but after seeing this news it looks like I'll be stuck in IBM WebSphere for years to come! 


IBM Java anyone?

[brackeen]

We're all going to be coding in Netclipse. Or EcBeans?

[brackeen]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this will be fine. Many business apps are using Java on the desktop, so IBM won't kill it. Plus, IBM loves Apache, so maybe they'll convert Java to an Apache-compatible license.

[kappa]

Comes at a bad time for us though, Sun was just starting to focus on the consumer experience (improved applets, deployment, jigsaw, etc) hopefully this won't mean an end to that.

But on the bright side IBM was involved in the making of the Cell chip, xbox and Wii, so there is a possibility we could see some java focus that way.

[cylab]

We're all going to be coding in Netclipse. Or EcBeans?

I guess this is meant as a joke, but I have to comment on this. It is highly unlikely for Netbeans and Eclipse ever merging. Both solve the same problems in completely different ways and they have different GUI toolkits and module architectures. Given that both depend heavily on existing code and cummunity plugins, I can't see a way to merge them.

[kappa]

I guess this is meant as a joke, but I have to comment on this. It is highly unlikely for Netbeans and Eclipse ever merging. Both solve the same problems in completely different ways and they have different GUI toolkits and module architectures. Given that both depend heavily on existing code and cummunity plugins, I can't see a way to merge them.

One will have to die (or set free into the opensource jungle), can't see it making any sense for IBM to support both Eclipse and Netbeans. My guess is it'll be Netbeans .

[cylab]

One will have to die (or set free into the opensource jungle), can't see it making any sense for IBM to support both Eclipse and Netbeans. My guess is it'll be Netbeans .

As I said, would be a pity, now that Netbeans is useable at last (I still hate Eclipse, though. Guess this would be good news for Intellij)

[gouessej]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this will be fine. Many business apps are using Java on the desktop, so IBM won't kill it. Plus, IBM loves Apache, so maybe they'll convert Java to an Apache-compatible license.

Please no! Keep Java under GPL.

[Ranger]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this will be fine. Many business apps are using Java on the desktop, so IBM won't kill it. Plus, IBM loves Apache, so maybe they'll convert Java to an Apache-compatible license.

I agree.  I watched Sun buy an awesome language (Forte) because it was making loads of money, then they totally mismanaged it until they finally killed it 2 years ago.  Sun, IMO is not a software company.  Java will be better off with any of the other companies.

[ewjordan]

This is still early in the game though.  We may here other companies are sniffing around as well (ie this announcement was leaked intentionally to drive up the price?)

The market appears to think an acquisition of some sort is incredibly likely: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=JAVA#chart1:symbol=java;range=5d;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

Sun's up 80% since the announcement, without much of a dent in IBM (http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=IBM#chart1:symbol=ibm;range=5d;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined)

I'm ultimately somewhat optimistic about this - personally, I think IBM is a far superior company business-wise (disclaimer: I've been long IBM for quite a while, and would not touch JAVA with a ten foot pole), and that could mean extremely good things for desktop Java simply because of the possibility that they've got enough cash on hand to throw a few more people on the project (IIRC Sun currently only has a very small handful of people on desktop Java, and even if IBM just put a few more people on the job it could help significantly).  Sun has always struck me as the prime example of what happens when you fill a company with brilliant technical people and mismanage them into the ground, so perhaps IBM can put the great minds there to better use; anyhow, I think it's long past time for Sun's current form to give way to something new...that said, I'd probably agree that I'd prefer someone else to do the buying-out, ideally someone with a little more incentive to focus on end-user Java (Google, where are you in this?  Don't tell me you wouldn't love to guide Java's evolution yourselves...).

Interesting times for Sun and Java, though...on balance, I'm cautiously hopeful that this will lead to something good.

[zammbi]

I had never known that!

That's also new to me. I didn't know it stand for anything.

If IBM did buy Sun I would hope it would add more developers to the Java side.
I would rather see Google buy Java, I know they would manage it well.

[Mr. Gol]

I would rather see Google buy Java, I know they would manage it well.

I agree, the Google libraries I use (Guice and Google Collections, don't even know if they have more) are truly excellent. Plus Joshua Bloch works for them

[JoglHurt]

Humm.. I quickly read every reply I think but I am not sure was this discussed: What happens in office battle? IBM has put a lot of effort and money to that Lotus thing but sun has OpenOffice.org which sound to me much more widely used.

Humm.. btw. Doesn't Play Station 3 have PowerPc kind of processors made by IBM. There already exists JVM on PPC architechture on macs. Play Station also uses Open GL soo 1+1 =   

[Tobiking]

Humm.. btw. Doesn't Play Station 3 have PowerPc kind of processors made by IBM. There already exists JVM on PPC architechture on macs. Play Station also uses Open GL soo 1+1 =   

The XBox 360 and the Wii also have a ppc based processor where IBM was involved.

[Eli Delventhal]

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I love Java, but I honestly think Sun hasn't done too much that I care about lately. IBM is a cool company, but I've never seen anything they did which I really cared about either (except Eclipse). I would be hesitant to have Google buy them because I'm honestly worried about Google becoming an internet monopoly. In terms of doing stuff for the end-user, Apple purchasing Sun might be interesting, mostly because then maybe I could finally use Java on the iPhone. 

But anyway I think it's really hard to say what will happen here. We'll see, I suppose.