Bechtolsheim: Sun dominated with technical workstations in the '90s. More recently, many customers have looked at Linux on x86 as their preferred solution in traditional engineering scientific markets. This is a market where I believe Sun will be very successful with Opteron, but more likely on the Linux front. You could call this a technical early-adopter market.
But in traditional business markets--financial services, airlines, insurance--those are not the kinds of customers that want to buy the latest version of Linux that's changing every six months. Those are the companies that really want stability, and Solaris does very well there. With Opteron, for the same cost of hardware, you can run Linux free with no support, pay for Red Hat Linux, or pay for Windows. What will really be apparent very shortly is that Windows will be the most expensive, supported Red Hat Linux will fall in the middle, and Solaris will be the lowest cost.
InformationWeek: There's a bigger question about Sun, though, and that's as companies increasingly buy Intel, Windows, and Linux for their computing work, did Sun bet on the wrong horse with RISC and Unix?
Bechtolsheim: Solaris on Sparc is a $100 billion installed-base market of people still using it--it's the single-most-successful architecture in history. The standard is actually Sparc-Solaris. IDC and others get this wrong by believing the Intel marketing. But Itanium isn't going anywhere fast as far as I can tell.
Opteron also lets Sun sell an industry-standard environment on x86. If there's any criticism of Sun, it's that its been too religiously focused on Sparc-Solaris. And now we have Linux and Opteron, and it increases the market opportunity.
