Sun's courting of start-ups discloses a new quandary -- it needs to compete with its core market
In the mashup and SOA worlds, frankly, Sun's defined value (high performance at low cost) grows, but it's addressable market actually shrinks. Because there will be a handful or mega-service providers, who will necessarily mostly customize their infrastructure to tune it to specific apps and transactional functions. And that is not a Java Enterprise Suite, and it won't be off-the-shelf software at all -- but it will be off-the-shelf hardware.