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Why didn't Google buy Sun?

• kev009 10y ago
  From a sustaining Sun's business perspective, it would have been a very poor fit. Sun had hardware product development as a principle effort, a variety of support channels and organizations for hardware and software, professional services, marketing, technical and executive sales etc. Basically many things Google is anemic at. In a way, Google kind of hacked the requirements expected of a business and it sort of works for many of the products they offer, but you can see where they totally flop with the Motorola acquisition and other ventures like Google Fiber. This stuff is hard, and it's really hard to find people that really care and have the ability to execute instead of simply being "qualified" From a talent and technology acquisition perspective, it would have been absolutely sage. Sun hardware folks could have shifted away from general purpose CPUs to switching and packet processing. OpenSolaris was a tour de force, especially with a legitimate hindsight comparison to where Linux was at the time. If they could have cherry-picked parts of Sun and shed the sustaining business around storage, commercial Solaris, SPARC etc that would have been ideal.