Saturday, April 11, 2009

Why Google Should Buy Sun

Time for a Kaleidoscope break...

Disclaimer: this post is not polished but is more of sharing a thought I had recently, and I wanted to share this idea before I started to get caught up with other things...

If you have been reading the news lately, IBM decided to step away from an acquisition by Sun Microsystems (New York Times article link). Although I am not an expert on some of the details that ultimately led to the failure of the deal, I think it is IBM's loss. I have always seen IBM as a software-hardware powerhouse. They can do anything they put their minds to doing. Additionally I can remember people predicting the demise of IBM back in the early 1990's when Microsoft seemed to be the "new IBM". Without doing too much research, here is an article that kind of focuses on IBM's business shifts in the 1990's (http://knowledge.wpcarey.asu.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1511).

I have always thought of Sun as the company that really understood the network even before most people knew that there was a network or how important it would be to their daily lives. I will admit that I was very enamored with Java back when it first came out. I thought that it was going to be "the language" to change everything. Virtual machines were the future...and so forth. Sun still understands the layers above the network better than most other people and still make a very good operating system that has been open sourced to some extent (OpenSolaris). Despite what people may think, Sun makes awesome software and is a software innovator. The problem with Sun is that it is in a position where it needs financial help to become viable. On its own, it cannot survive effectively. It rode the dot com boom, but commodity hardware and free Linux software seriously damaged their business model. The conflict between giving Java away and licensing Java also was a tough problem that needed to be resolved with giving Java to the community for the most part. Even though Sun cannot effectively survive in its current size to compete with companies like HP and IBM like it used to, Sun still can be a game changer for a company that can leverage their assets and rebirth the company effectively.

That is why I think Sun should be purchased by Google.

Google is the beneficiary of the Sun mantra: the network is the computer. Google is the first company to really push that idea into the minds of ordinary people. Google needs huge hardware and well-utilized networks. Google needs to make sure that Android succeeds (which is some Java ME variant). Sun knows VMs, servers, and networks. Sun is capable of morphing Solaris into some giant internet-sized Google OS. For Google to become a dominant force in enterprise computing and mobile computing and if Google wants to be the next major OS, Google needs to purchase Sun before somebody else figures this out.