I still don't see a business case for it, though. Continuing to develop SPARC will cost a lot of money and won't buy them any extra lock-in. As far as DB apps a

I still don't see a business case for it, though. Continuing to develop SPARC will cost a lot of money and won't buy them any extra lock-in. As far as DB apps are concerned Oracle is the platform, what it runs on is transparent. Edited to add: and the same goes for Java, which on Unix accounts for 99% of enterprise sw development. As far as I can figure out the only reason IBM has to keep developing POWER is their mainframe business, which is the king of platform lock-in :)