IBM in talks to Acquire Sun Microsystems

If you don't follow Sun Microsystems closely like me, about the only thing you hear about the company are it quarterly losses which have gone on for years. Once criticized for its closed proprietary SPARC hardware architecture, Sun has reinvented itself as leader in the Open software movement. OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, Glassfish open server and Java sit prominently on its home page.

And now the news is IBM wants to buy Sun for $6.5B which would constitute its biggest acquisition ever. That's no surprise, really. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sun had been shopping itself around for a while to the likes of Dell and H-P, too.

Sun had a real presence in the bio-pharma world several years when I served as executive editor at Bio-IT World. So did Compaq's Alpha-based servers. Those servers had the intense number crunching power to decode genes. Intel-based servers were just starting to penetrate that market and have since taken over undercutting the market for Sun and Alpha.

Should this deal come to pass, Sun will disappear into the vastness of Big Blue. Perhaps, Sun's most enduring contribution to the computers we use everyday is Java, the games and applications language that attracted droves of Internet developers in droves. Java's in everything from PCs to Ricoh copiers to the Amazon Kindle. Ironically, IBM which has been selling off hardware operations over the years and focusing on services would see hardware revenues rise to one third of its total if the Sun deal goes through.

I will miss Sun founder Scott McNealy who stepped back from running Sun day to day in 2006. He's still chairman. McNealy was a brilliant fighter with a wonderful sense of humor and penchant for the unorthodox. His best verbal darts were usually reserved for Microsoft and he love to label Windows a "hairball."

I once showed up for an interview with Scott at Harvard and he had his mom in tow. She patiently sat through the interview. At a Pebble Beach golf tournament a decade or so ago, we signed golf balls "Greetings, Spencer F. Katt" and deliberately hit them into the yard of his new house on the 16th hole (I think it was the 16th). Later, he told us his uncle had found them. He got a kick out of it. Spencer was PC Week's popular rumor monger.

Scott loved a good joke. No joke, though, Sun sold to IBM has to hurt.