December 9th, 2004
Sun-Dell: Is it a chicken and egg problem?
In a blog entry I wrote a couple of days ago regarding Dell’s position on pre-loading Solaris, I said that the ball is now in Sun’s court [see Dell to Sun: You build it (demand) and we'll come]. Comments made by Judy Chavis, Dell’s director of business development for its enterprise product group, are the closest that Dell has ever come to saying that Solaris has a shot. Said Chavis, "[Sun] has to get to the point where Microsoft and industry-standard operating systems are today, then we’ll talk. But they don’t have the volume or the customer demand for it." It’s as if the door has been open, but just a crack, with Michael Dell peering out from the inside, and with the safety chain still in place.
Solaris apparently has a chicken-and-egg problem on its hands. On the one hand, Solaris needs a channel like Dell’s for it to be driven into the market on a mass scale. On the other hand, Dell won’t give Solaris the time of day until it has been driven into the market on a mass scale. That conservative approach — where Dell waits for some technology to achieve critical market mass before diving in — has served the company well. Given the substantial cost of providing Dell-is-swell-like support, somewhere on a Dell beancounter’s spreadsheet must be a formula that proves how the company has to move a certain amount of product before the profits aren’t wiped out by the costs to support it.
But, the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether Dell is short-changing its customers by not offering a Solaris pre-load. Here’s why: Not that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL, which Dell will sell you) isn’t a good operating system. But I’ve yet to find a *nix expert who doesn’t think of Solaris as the blue chip *nix. The problem with Solaris, they’d almost always tell you, wasn’t that they didn’t want it. It’s just that, compared to Linux, it was too darn expensive because of the SPARC-based hardware that was required to run it. Not everyone can afford a Porsche or a Mercedes. Not only were the older versions of Solaris x86 slow performers, but few people really took them seriously – and Sun certainly didn’t put a lot of wood behind them. But now that Sun is serious about Solaris x86, things may have changed.
Not only is Sun claiming that Solaris x86 is faster than Linux; it’s claiming that it can run applications designed to run on RHEL unchanged. Also, because they now come from the same source tree, Solaris x86 is supposedly just as blue chip as Solaris for SPARC, and that it’s cheaper than RHEL. Need another reason? (For desktop Solaris?) As Sun’s Tim Bray says in his blog about the most recent pre-release of Solaris, "what I think is also newsworthy is that Solaris comes with StarOffice (as in Sun’s souped-up version of OpenOffice) on-board." Even at pre-load prices, I can’t imagine a combination of Windows and MS-Office comparing favorably to a pre-load of Solaris on price.
If all of these claims are true (and so far, Red Hat hasn’t stepped forward to say they’re not), then isn’t it beholden upon Dell to advise its customers that there might be better options for them on the desktop and the server? Of course, then there are the market realities hiding on that beancounter’s spreadheet. Dell didn’t get to be where it is (where it could break the back of IBM) by taking risks in nascent markets. Recall that Dell was one of the last manufacturers to jump into the PocketPC market with its Axim PDA.
So, with Solaris in a chicken-and-egg Catch-22, and Dell apparently seeing the value in Solaris, but just waiting for the economics to be right, what can Sun do to grease the wheels of the Solaris x86 ecosystem? Perhaps the answer is that Sun should take on the burden of certifying Dell’s hardware and then handling all tech support calls for Dell systems running Solaris. That doesn’t take care of all the additional costs that Dell might have to bear in order to offer an additional pre-load. But then again, it sets Dell up to offer an alternative that might be in the best interests of its customers — which makes it a better partner to those customers.
