Forbes on IBM+Sun: There will be blood

John West at InsideHPC comments and links to a Forbes article with a gedanken experiment. The net of this is that huge swaths of Sun offerings would be EOLed. Huge swaths. Which is similar to what John and I said in separate articles. The Forbes article notes something that should give customers some pause:

We agree. This would end a proprietary product, with no real chance of followon going forward. One of the huge dangers in any IT purchase is the possibility of an un-recoverable bricking at some point. Say for example, your storage vendor goes away, can you get support for the system? With JackRabbit and ΔV, you can. With Thumper and Thor, you are SOL. This is a risk you have to consider and price into your analysis. This is why we make JackRabbit and ΔV open. This lowers your risk. Yes, you have less risk going with an open supportable platform than a proprietary non-supportable one. Think about it this way. You go spend all this money on something, that you really, really don’t want to have turned into a door stop due to a business decision or action. With an open system, the risk of bricking and loss of value is very low. With a proprietary system, it is very high. We will have some interesting announcements about this soon. Stay tuned.