Geekonomics

Tags:  Java, facebook, M&A, Sun, IBM

izamryan

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izamryan says...
Let me expand a bit on possible synergies in an AAPL [1] / JAVA [2] tie up.


(A) Apple's current product portfolio has a big gap: enterprise computing. Sun's current product portfolio has a big gap: desktop/laptop. An AAPL/JAVA entity would have a filled out portfolio (which may be a good or a bad thing, depending on who you ask).

Apple's engineers are adding some great low-level Unix technologies to Mac OS X, probably one of the more important ones is: Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM). LLVM spawned the developments in Grand Central (multicore optimisation), OpenCL (using GPU's for general computing) and more recently, MacRuby speedups (Ruby = internet scripting languge du jour).

Sun's position in the high-end 3D visualisation and animation & arena is gradually being encroached upon at the lower end by top-of-the-range Intel-based workstations.

An AAPL/JAVA entity would have the ability to cross-fertilise a lot of great technology. LLVM speedups in enterprise Unix would be a unique selling proposition. Supplementing Sun's position in visualisation with Apple's top-of-the-range Unix workstations would also create a unique selling proposition.


(B) Developers love ease-of-deployment. An environment on your laptop/workstation consistent with what's in your Production environment means you can simplify testing and deployment. Consolidating Mac OS X / Solaris technologies could mean giving your developers a Mac to develop with, then use one-click deployment to Solaris enterprise servers.

(Yes, you can get some of this going w/ open source on both Mac OS X and Solaris, but I haven't seen it done with "It Just Works" simplicity. There have been great strides made in this area though, with things like Ruby on Rails, but I still feel there may be room for improvement.)


(C) By the way - this is all just pure absolute speculation / kopitiam talk! An IBM/JAVA consolidation would have strength in the Enterprise field, while an AAPL/JAVA consolidation could very well be one of the best places for Geeks to work.



[1] www.google.com...
[2] www.google.com...

Apr 07, 2009 13:03

izamryan

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izamryan says...
> What about their wonderful servers and top of the line
> storage devices? They have some pretty good and value-for
> money wintel servers, too, right?

Yes, one of the most interesting wintel servers is their codename: Thumper server.

sg.sun.com...

With Sun owning the MySQL brand, you can expect to see some very interesting applications of Thumpers + MySQL for data warehousing & business intelligence.

One of the other interesting server technologies in their arsenal is the Niagara / Coolthreads servers:

sg.sun.com...
sg.sun.com...

The T2000 can go up to 32 simultaneous threads, while the T5440 will go up to 256 simultaneous threads (in a 4U enclosure).

Combined with Solaris's ZFS & Containers technologies, you can virtualise / consolidate a lot of workloads from old servers onto these CoolThreads machines, in line with current Green computing / business continuity type initiatives.

Apr 07, 2009 13:15

ShiningStar

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ShiningStar says...
I think Java is only things I really know about Sun as well. Although I think they had Linux OS, I'm not too sure.

Apr 07, 2009 19:04

Geekonomics

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Geekonomics says...
@Izam, nice to see you here! Wow so much info!

I think Sun's thin client solutions are actually pretty neat, not sure about the traction though. But they do have this desktop offering too.
I think the fact that Sun developed Wintel servers shows that they are gunning for the mass market, so I'm not sure if Apple's market is mass enough for them to be sustainable. But you're definitely right about an ideal environment for geeks to work! On a side note, I'm not sure if MySQL is really suitable for data warehousing & business intelligence.. I had trouble getting it to perform under a pretty simple corporate environment and had to painfully migrate everybody to MS SQL after the system went live. I won't wanna go through that again!

@ShiningStar - After Java, Sun was prolly most noted for Open Office. They had some Linux servers but they were never really a big thing for Sun, although Solaris (UNIX based) was a defining product for them as well.

Apr 08, 2009 00:27

ShiningStar

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ShiningStar says...
I got confused with Sun and Novell. Sun is pretty vestile I suppose.

Apr 09, 2009 00:36

Geekonomics

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Geekonomics says...
End of discussion I guess, Oracle just bought over Sun. What a nice move, I must say. Bye bye to MySQL though :(

Apr 21, 2009 21:37