Sun to ship Microsoft Windows Server on its hardware
Longtime rivals and occasional collaborators Sun Microsystems and Microsoft announced on Wednesday that Sun will ship 64-bit servers with Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system. — Within 90 days, Sun will offer Windows Server 2003 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Sun has been dismantling its own single-OS identity for over a year: in February 2006 it laid out plans to build a Linux ecosystem around its hardware rather than rely on Solaris alone. The Microsoft agreement is the logical next step — within 90 days Sun will offer 64-bit servers running Windows Server 2003, making it a certified Windows OEM like Dell, HP and IBM.
The story traveled widely on announcement day, with The Register and Wired's Epicenter both picking it up; Epicenter framed the deal around virtualization as much as the OS itself, reflecting how Sun and Microsoft have oscillated between rivalry and collaboration since their 2004 legal peace settlement.
First-order effects
- Sun's x64 server customers can now standardize on Windows Server 2003 without leaving Sun hardware, removing the last OS-based reason for Windows shops to buy from Dell or HP instead.
- Microsoft gains a new OEM channel into Sun's installed base of datacenter accounts — precisely the customers least likely to have considered Windows servers before.
Second-order effects
- Dell, HP and IBM lose 'Windows-certified' as a differentiator against Sun, forcing competition onto price, services and virtualization features where Sun's cross-platform stack competes directly.
- Sun now sells Solaris, Linux and Windows side by side, which sharpens internal questions about where Solaris investment goes — and gives Solaris a new job as the differentiating layer on top of commodity OS choices.
Third-order effects
- If major vendors keep shipping all three OSes on identical x86 hardware, the server industry moves further toward commodity silicon plus a customer-chosen OS, with vendor identity resting on management software, virtualization and support rather than operating systems.
- Microsoft's willingness to license Windows Server broadly to former rivals signals a platform-defense posture: widening distribution matters more than protecting OEM exclusivity as Linux pressures the server OS market.
The trend: Server vendors are shedding exclusive-OS identities and converging on multi-OS x86 hardware platforms, with operating systems becoming a customer choice rather than a vendor allegiance.