It’s all over Techmeme: the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times report that IBM is in talks with Sun Microsystems to acquire the fledgling technology giant. Larry Dignan over at ZDnet says it makes sense, Dana Garder over at … also ZDnet calls it a red herring. Om Malik says it would make more sense for Cisco Systems to buy Sun, CNET’s Matt Asay says a deal would be good for open source. Meanwhile, Sun’s stock soars.
But Computerworld may have the best commentary we’ve read about the rumored acquisition. Lucas Mearian writes:
“If it purchased Sun, IBM would bolster its storage customer base and eliminate competition, but such a move would also create significant storage product overlap. Rather than boosting its existing product sales, IBM would likely gain more in the form of intellectual property and human resources talent.
While Sun and IBM both sell in the high-end storage market, IBM holds three times the market share of Sun.
Neither Sun nor IBM does well in the midrange storage market, and enterprise-class systems is an area some believe is tanking as a result of an uptick in more-modular, flexible storage platforms based on high-capacity, lower-performance disk drives and commodity hardware.”
To be continued beyond any shred of doubt.