Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: An Open Letter to Sam Palmisano, CEO, IBM Corp.

Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: An Open Letter to Sam Palmisano, CEO, IBM Corp.: "We've repeatedly passed along customer interest in having IBM support Solaris 10 with WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products. Customers have made repeated calls to you and your staff. Those same customers have now asked me to begin communicating with you in a more public and visible way - they'd like the choice to run IBM products on Solaris 10, and they're feeling that your withholding support is part of a vendor lock-in strategy. A strategy to trap them into IBM's proprietary Power5 platform only.
Frankly, that behavior is reminiscent of an IBM history many CIO's would like to forget."

Reality check:
1. IBM should focus on growing software platform market opportunities; it's not clear Solaris will ever be on that list again, and maybe Sun can explain why IBM should lend its support to Solaris when AIX is its most significant and direct competitor.
2. BTW IBM also seems to be effectively controlling the future of Java, especially with Eclipse and the new Workplace Client Technology; it's not clear that IBM needs a lot of help from Sun these days...

Lots of conflicts at the intersection of (real or ostensible) Internet-enlightened modus operandi and classic capitalism these days; interesting times...