IBM is looking to acquire Sun Microsystems. Hmm, that’s not really all that earth shattering. It might have been 15 years ago.
IBM, once the king of the mainframe, now the maker of servers with bad support (from my experience) and poor integration with others (again from my experience). On the software side they have Lotus Domino, flailing about like a woolly Mammoth in a tar pit, inevitably going to die at the hands of Exchange and various online services (including hosted Exchange and Google).
Then there is Sun Microsystems. Once the proud makers of Solaris and purple servers that cost too much. Linux came along and kicked that habit to the kerb. Microsoft also put in a few boots by improving the acceptability of Windows in the enterprise data centre. What do Sun do now? Java … pfft! The version incompatibilities and frequent updates make that a pain in the proverbial to have on the network. I remember when Java was launched. They claimed this platform would be universal across operating systems. That worked. Unfortunately applications are locked to versions of Java and aren’t upwards compatible. Give me .NET any day of the week.
This acquisition is like two elderly people on their deathbeds getting married. It’s cute and has an aww factor but it isn’t going to produce any kids.