Sun is railing at Microsoft, but maybe it should be hiring coders rather than lawyers. Sun boss Scott McNealy is an entertaining act, with a nice line in puns. For example, Microsoft's .net becomes ".not", Intel's Itanium is the "Itanic", and IBM's Regatta server is "Regretta". As comedians, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are not in the same league. However, what the company has to say no longer seems relevant or interesting. In the 1980s, Sun beat the drum for networking and open standards, and those were important campaigns. Today, everybody is in favour of both, but it is still unclear why anybody should buy Sun servers running Sun's Solaris on Sun's Sparc chips with Sun's iPlanet software, or Sun's Unix workstations with Sun's Hotjava browser and Sun's Star Office suite. A decade ago, buying Sun looked less proprietary and far less restrictive than something that locked you in to IBM for life. But, now that you can run GNU/Linux on cheap Intel hardware, how many people care?
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