When Silicon Graphics Inc decided to ditch the MIPS RISC as its long-term microprocessor of choice in favor of Intel Corp architecture, Sun Microsystems Inc saw an opportunity to expand its Solaris x86 OEM program and approached SGI about a licensing deal. A senior SGI executive present at the meetings who did not want to be named said: We did our serious technical due diligence, and declined, for both technical and business reasons. Of course we’d like to have Solaris’ ISV portfolio, but there was no way to get it without giving up too many other things that our customers expect, and Solaris is technically fine in some areas, and a long way back in others. Moreover, he said, there turned out to be a piece of Irix [SGI’s Unix] they wanted, but we ended up saying no. He declined to say which piece. SGI eventually announced it would port its Irix Unix to Intel’s IA-64 architecture. It will come as no surprise to battle-scarred Unix watchers to learn that Sun recalls events somewhat differently, saying it turned down a license request from SGI. Sun says Solaris is not available for modification – presumably SGI would have wanted to incorporate its graphics technologies. Although all of the substance of the meetings were under NDA it hasn’t prevented participants – and others – from briefing their sources. Indeed SGI claims: Sun broke the NDA before we even got going on the due diligence, told our customers we were going to dump Irix for Solaris; and then when we didn’t, apparently started telling people we’d approached them, and they’d said no. It’s in this light that Wall Street brokerage Morgan Stanley Dean Witter observed: We were surprised to learn that Sun refused to license Solaris to SGI. We have been aggressive in arguing that Sun derives very important advantages from Solaris-ISV momentum, scalability, mind share, etc. MSDW argues Sun’s refusal would mean that Sun would fear losing server sales to SGI ccNUMA servers running Solaris. If Solaris on Origin [SGI servers] could outperform Solaris on Starfire as SGI claims, we think Sun did the ruthless and smart thing. Sun maintains it turned SGI down for the same reason it claims to have sent Sequent Computer Systems Inc packing when it was evaluating Solaris x86. It said both wanted to roll their own APIs, which would mean fragmenting the operating system as well as the ISV community. Whatever the truth of the matter MSDW maintains Irix – which SGI is porting to Intel’s 64-bit IA-64 architecture – operating system remains the Achilles heal of SGI’s server business. It is a weakness not because of its rich technical features, but because the installed base of Irix servers is much smaller than servers running Solaris, HP-UX, Bravo (Digital Unix), or IBM’s AIX. While SGI intends to move Irix closer in functionality to Solaris, lack of volume and mind share with software vendors as the Unix server space consolidates could be an important weakness for SGI. It says SGI has ruled out a port of HP-UX or DEC Bravo to its servers. SGI maintains the technical [Sun] folks we dealt with were pretty straightforward. However while there any many honest and reasonable people at Sun, in sales/executive-land, there has long been an ethos of dishonesty, in particular, a willingness to tell outright lies about competitors, and a willingness to convince a potential partner to do something that will be mutually beneficial, while meanwhile doing everything possible to make sure the partner gets taken-advantage of – ask people from Solbourne, or Amdahl, for example. There is an awful lot of behind-the-scenes horse-trading that goes on around this business … but in the Valley, everybody knows you watch your back when dealing with Sun, especially when they tell you How Good It Will Be For You.
