My colleague Jim Grisanzio noted Ashlee Vance's piece in the Register about the Merrill Lynch analyst who thinks Sun should buy Red Hat or Novell. Surprisingly, Jim only cited the Merrill Lynch argument; he failed to mention Ashlee Vance's devastating rebuttal. Key quotes (with my emphasis):
Merrill Lynch ignores how messy Sun's purchase of a Linux vendor could be. We doubt that open source zealots would warm to the idea of Sun controlling the dominate [sic] version of Linux as quickly as the analyst firm suggests. We doubt that IBM, HP or Dell would let such an acquisition happen in the first place.Merrill Lynch's myopic focus on what Red Hat might mean to Sun is also totally absurd. The entire IT community would be shaken by such a buy. Sun would pay a premium for something it doesn't really need. It can ship Linux on servers just as easily as Dell can.
Backing Linux in a major, major way would make Sun look like every other vendor, and this is not a role Sun is well suited to handle. At times, it seems that Sun exists for no other reason that to be different from the herd and offer customers a choice.
This last point is important. As I've mentioned before, people expect Sun to be the industry's creative, iconoclastic contrarian. A "me too" Sun would confuse (and disappoint) them. We at Sun need to meet this expectation in our conversations with them - this is simply cluetrain 101 stuff. And this fits with Ashlee's bottom line:
Sun has got to out-invent, not out-acquire its rivals to be "hot" again. Customers will pay more attention to a screaming fast, cheap Opteron box that can run either Solaris x86 or Red Hat than they will to Sun buying an expensive open source software unit in Raleigh, North Carolina.Posted by geoff2 at December 16, 2004 06:03 PM
No need to be "surprised" ... I didn't "only cite the Merrill Lynch argument ... and I didn't "fail" to do anything.
I was just poking some fun, that's all. The only thing I was interested in was their use of language. That's it. Nothing more. I didn't flush out Ashlee's views because I wanted to give people something to read. Notice the "nice" and "long" comments right up front? That's what they are for. I'm basically implying that there's a good long commentary to read ... go and check it out ... that's all. Also, the comments I *did* quote from Ashlee demonstrate quite clearly his view of Merrill's recommendations. He's clearly making fun of Merrill. You want more of this? Click on this handy dandy little link over here and go read more. Also, I don't in any way think Merrill's views are inane, as you imply in your comment on my blog. Not for a second. How they expressed it, however, was pretty funny. That was the substance of the post, and that's what I preferred to emphasize.
Posted by: Jim Grisanzio at December 16, 2004 07:09 PM