Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Getting back to technology

I saw someone on a random internet forum suggesting Apple should buy Yahoo. No...

What does Yahoo really have?

Search? They've pretty much given up on that haven't they?

Flickr? Nice site but it's impossible to make money off it.

Delicious? The single most overrated site on the Internet.

Buzz? Just buy Digg if that's what you're looking for.

Mail? Probably their only big asset but if Apple wanted to they could open me.com mail to free users. You'd be assured almost every iPhone & Mac user would sign-up. Not quite to the level of Yahoo mail's user base but not a bad start either.

Yahoo Personals? Yeah... nevermind

Yahoo Messenger? Meh

If they wanted to take advantage of the slumping economy they should look at Sun:

-Good developers, good technology, lots of IP.
-Extremely solid UNIX based platform. It could easily power OSX down the road when mach has finally died of equal parts old age & neglect.
-They know how to build top notch computers.
-OSX Server is a great product. Apple could sell a lot of servers if they really got serious about it.


Ultimately they'd be buying Sun for personal, not product. Apple has zero use for UltraSPARC 4i but those engineers could end up working with the PA Semi guys on whatever Apple is cooking up. They might have some use for their Grid & cluster stuff as an infrastructure for hardcore highly scalable FinalCut setups (Final Cut Server) Logic Nodes, etc.

Plus, they could just sell high end boxes. There's a small, but loyal, following of X-Serve/XSan especially in content production, education & science. Apple knows how to produce good hardware, OSX Server is fantastic. Plus they can just sell Windows Server boxes or virtualization platforms.

I've been advocating Apple buy Sun for like 4 years. Now would definitely be the time for it. Good long term investment to sure up the fundamentals of the company.

1 comment:

Randy said...

YOU STAY AWAY FROM MY DELICIOUS.