Sun + IBM = ?

What? What? WHAT?

I know I'm supposed to have something intelligent to say here, but the idea of Sun Microsystems being bought out by IBM is so bizzare, I don't.

(Subtitled for the non-nerds in the audience: Sun and IBM are essentially competors down the line. They make and sell exactly the same stuff. This is, in many ways, the tech equivalent of McDonalds buying Burger King. It may be great for the stockholders, but you can be pretty sure that the new restaraunt won't be selling both Whoppers and Big Macs.)

I've been a Sun fan for a long, long time. I think Solaris is probably the best operating system on the planet, those SPARC pizza-boxes are incredible machines, and Java, all things considered, is probably the biggest thing to hit programming in the last 30 years.

Sun's problem, of course, is that they can't manage to get anything over that hill and into "fully functional."

Let me give you an example. Sun makes an operating system called Solaris. It's a UNIX derivative, and came out of a project in the late '80s to fold all the then-existing Unicies into one system. It's spectacular, and chock full of kick-ass nerd features. You really couldn't ask for a better "enterprise-grade" server OS.

So. Being a Unix, it's very command-line based. It's got a cool windows-esque desktop and all, but really, you end up back at the old DOS-style commandline sooner or later. When you drop to the command line, the backspace key doesn't work.

Let that roll around in your mind a little. Solaris, arguably the most advanced server OS on the market, and it's been in existance for over 20 years. Sun Microsystems, a multi-million dollar company. At no point, did anyone say, "you know, maybe we should have a guy spend a week and wire up the backspace key?"

And really, that's every Sun product. Absolutely fantastic feature set until you get right down to the wire, and they go "nah. Who uses backspace?"