Double Checking Sun's Reality Check
by Volker Weber
On February 24 2002, Shahin Khan, Sun's Chief Competitive Officer, published an op-ed about IBM's new "Linux only" mainframe, the IBM z800. The article can be found on Sun's web site: http://www.sun.com/executives/realitycheck/reality-022002.html.
In this article Mr. Khan heavily criticizes IBM's offer, on grounds of economic and technical viability and performance issues. Right off the bat, the fact that Sun feels compelled to rebuff IBM's efforts to put Linux on the mainframe tells us that Sun perceives this offer as a serious threat to its own server sales.