alt Hacker NewsThe iron law is that vendors want to become like the old Sun. The only reason they don't is if they are trying to compete their way up the hill. Take away the old Sun and SGI and IBM and now Dell is Sun.
Replies
Mistletoe • today at 8:19 PM
They should reexamine that wish.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/sun-microsystems/stock-price-...
Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps. All that Dell does is assembling standard, commoditized parts and putting a free OS on it. Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate, while Sun's business is extremely hard to replicate. Of course, Sun's competitive advantage turned into a curse when the components of that vertical integration become uncompetitive both features and price wise vs. the GNU/Linux-on-Intel stack. But regardless, Dell could never replicate the vertical integration Sun had.