Perhaps Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconagh is a lone voice in the woods. But if he's not and other Wall St. analysts feel the way he does, perhaps it's time for me to change jobs to pull down the insane amount of money that those guys do. According to a report by News.com's Stephen Shankland, Sacconagh is suggesting that a partnership between Dell and Sun Microsystems would help both companies with their server strategies. In a report he issued, Sacconagh wrote that Sun could gain an ally selling its Solaris version of the Unix operating system. Sacconagh also said
"As radical and unlikely as it might sound, a partnership between Dell and Sun could be mutually beneficial."
As I read this, I suddenly realize that the idea of a Dell-Sun partnership sounded vaguely familiar. Then, I dug through ZDNet's archives and found a column I wrote back in June 2002 that said:
One reason I called Dell was that if Intel and Sun were able to
overcome their impasse, perhaps Dell could become Sun's volume partner.
After all, Dell's main enterprise competitors--HP and IBM--sell their own Unix flavors in addition to Linux. If a bunch
of Solaris customers were considering a switch to the Intel platform,
having Dell involved might give them even more comfort. And it would
give Dell a serious Unix option.
Then, I concluded with:
Wow. Now wouldn't that stir things up a bit? Intel and Sun make that
elusive phone call, patch things up, and let bygones be bygones--and
Dell becomes a primary channel for Sun while picking up a version of
Unix to compete against HP-UX and IBM AIX. Crazier things have happened.
Of course, the elusive phone call happened, but it wasn't with Intel. It was with AMD. Anyway, that was two years ago when I was the lone voice in the woods. Should I move to Wall Street? Does anybody know what they pay Wall Street analysts who go out on limbs?
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