No IBM deal? Confusion en route for Sun customers

From CNET News.com: Sun will tell its customers that the IBM deal was just a slight detour and that the company's plan to be a pivotal hardware, cloud-computing, and software provider remains intact. The big question is whether customers will buy Sun's talk--not to mention Sun's gear. For shareholders, Sun has to explain why it split over the IBM offer.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Sun's board is split (Techmeme). CEO Jonathan Schwartz wants the IBM deal. Chairman Scott McNealy doesn't. Guess who wins that one? McNealy, who is dead wrong by the way, will return quips and all and probably bring the company back to its hardware roots. It won't matter. Sun's customers need to know only one thing: Schwartz's strategy

Given reports that Sun had been shopping itself around and could find only IBM as a suitor, there's a decent chance that the company will remain independent for a bit. However, any customer buying from Sun will have to consider the ramifications of a purchase. For instance, if you're about to buy Sun hardware and Hewlett-Packard is in the running, why wouldn't you opt for the latter just to eliminate some uncertainty? After all, HP could buy Sun. What about cloud services? Will you trust your cloud to a company that has a tug-of-war under way over a buyout?

Look for Dell, IBM, and any other Sun rival to pounce into the fear, uncertainty, and doubt game. In the grand scheme of things, Sun was small potatoes for IBM. For Sun, the failure of the IBM-Sun talks was huge. --focusing the company on software--is in flux.

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