No surprise? Java is pretty big stuff in the corporate world that Oracle operates in, and had to be part of why they bought Sun. You wonder just what they're doing to piss off people like this so much.
I'm guessing you're very young. NT used to be available on x86, MIPS, AXP and PowerPC. It was developed not on x86 but on i960, a RISC processor from Intel. There were plans for a SPARC version too but endianness issues in the HAL meant it was never performant.
The only reason Windows only runs on x86/x64 now is that customers weren't interested in it on other platforms. Microsoft really tried to make it cross platform.
> Microsoft really tried to make it cross platform.
They just forgot to port Office. IIRC, the then-current release of Visual Studio would run on x86 but compile to supported RISC platforms. That turned it into a server-only platform. No Office and no development tools before the dawn of the web application means certain desktop doom.
There are alternate histories regarding that: like how non x86 versions of NT were subpar and had a dearth of available software, and likely only existed to freeze the market for open-systems unix vendors, all of which had those CPU architectures as a strategic advantage.
Glad HN is not slashdot. Please elaborate why selling more SPARC servers would not have been a good thing for the many SUN employees affected by the merger.
A huge market for high-end SPARC machines are enterprises, who use them to run Oracle RDBMS and SAP/other similar business software. IBM competes directly in this market with what used to be AS/400 and System/390 (not sure I know what they're called now, afaik iSeries and zSeries).
This isn't really about technology, it's about convincing these enterprises that it's better for them to scale vertically on a single machine than to scale horizontally on commodity hardware. From a technical point of view this has long been proven false, but for certain companies it may be true from a business point of view: if technology is a cost center (i.e., it's called "IT" not "R&D") and you don't have the talent needed to operate a cluster of commodity hardware (e.g, there are either no operations engineers who can program in your geographic area or they simply won't want to work for you) leasing/buying big iron (especially if it comes pre-configured and with a support contract) starts to sound attractive.
Even if SPARC is superior hardware, the customer simply wouldn't care. It would be more profitable for IBM to cut SPARC off and continue only with POWER. The professional services involved in this is the lucrative part for the vendor.
People who do care about technology, have in-house talent and do HPC (scientific computing, machine learning/data mining, Internet companies with scalability problems) are best served by x86_64 (in almost all cases excluding some types of computation), ia64 as well as IBM's own Power-based 1U/2U servers (what used to be the RS6000 series).
The OP hypothesized merger between IBM and Sun would have been better than Oracle/Sun. If IBM had bought Sun, they would probably have killed the SPARC because IBM has their own RISC CPU, the Power series.
IBM maintain their mainframe business. While nobody's writing new applications for ZSeries, much like SPARC, there are some very profitable, untouched apps that run on Solaris 8/SPARC and they'll be around till the company gets the time and budget to port them.
Apart from seeing the beautiful elegant hardware running a second-rate port of a second-rate OS and the patents Sun owns ending up on being auctioned to patent trolls so they could have a field day destroying every competition for Windows without implying Microsoft, nothing.
Guys... Even if you disagree (and you don't want to debate the issue and prefer to down-vote the comment) with Windows being a second-rate OS and that a SPARC port would not be a priority for Microsoft, you you have to agree that having all those shiny patents covering all kinds of stuff being auctioned off to trolls would impact everybody.
Not me, at least directly, because I live in Brazil and we have no such software patent nonsense, but tech business would be quite impossible where they are valid.
I doubt people are down-voting because of your views of the relative merits of this or that OS, but rather because the expression of those views is long on slogans and short on insight.
I tend to downvote posts if the author complains about being downvoted.
Also, not only were you "long on slogans and short on insight" but your argument doesn't fly. (IBM usually keeps the patents of the companies that it buys.)
I was speculating on what would happen if Microsoft bought Sun and decided to port Windows to SPARC.
IBM would want to keep the patents for itself, but Microsoft would probably wrap them in a do-not-hit-us term and sell them to trolls. This way they could undermine the competition while staying completely out of it.
> Microsoft would probably wrap them in a do-not-hit-us term and sell them to trolls.
Oh really? How about some supporting evidence?
The best evidence would include examples. After all, Microsoft buys companies all the time. If this is something that Microsoft will "probably" do, surely they've done it several times before.
Edit: Just to be clear, these two firms would essentially own the mainframe market (sure IBM does pretty much already but that doesn't mean you let the acquire more market share)
