I’d much rather see HP take over Sun than IBM.
-Yossarian
ex-IBMer (PowerPC chip designer)
ex-SPARC chip designer
Silicon Valley Survivor
Sun had a culture more like HP. Scott McNeeley was more like Bill & Dave. After the dot bomb implosion, Scott fought firing employees to the detriment of shareholders but I think he thought he was doing the right thing.
IBM like GE and some other NY state big corps are like a bunch of mobsters.
HP sucked while Carly ran it but she was an AT&T dialtone salesperson and another NJ AT&T/Lucent gangster. Lucent as she was leaving got nailed for inflating sales numbers.
Why would HP need to, other than to deny it to IBM? HP has just about everything but the bragging rights of claiming that they own Java.
I don’t understand why IBM would be wanting to take on Sun either, and for the same reason. SPARC isn’t needed by either company. Workstations can now be powered with Core x86 chipsets quite nicely.
This change in the industry has been a long time coming. Sooner or later, all these players had to know that cisco was going to venture out of the twisted pair and onto the desktop. Whenever I’d suggest doing this sort of thing 10 years ago at cisco, I was told “not yet” — not “no, that’s not what we do...” — so this has been coming for awhile.
And as for which outfit to take over Sun: If I had to choose one or the other, I’d have to come down on IBM’s side. Carly destroyed HP - they’re nothing but a PeeCee box maker now. Prior to Fiorina wrecking HP, I’d have said that HP taking over Sun or SGI would have been a natural fit. Not now.