I see four cases where you'd be eager to deal with Sun. The first case is an integrated, one-stop-shop for SAMP [Solaris, Apache, MySQL and Python running in a

I see four cases where you'd be eager to deal with Sun. The first case is an integrated, one-stop-shop for SAMP [Solaris, Apache, MySQL and Python running in a JVM]. The second case is where you're in a corner and need to scale up. I wouldn't be surprised if Sun offers servers with 2048 cores. Another case is where you've got a huge volume of data on a SAN and the throughput of Solaris justifies the cost of the licenses. A final case involves the energy saving gained from RISC. However, I've previously argued this latter case ignores the opportunity cost to a fast growing organisation and is therefore irrelevant to a start-up ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123587 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123587 ). The other cases aren't important to new companies either. So, I agree with you that they're running out of options. I agree with Cringely that vertical integration isn't a big draw.