A tale of two companies

Perhaps the biggest news making the rounds in the industry for the past week has been the prospect of IBM acquiring Sun Microsystems. The combined entity would dominate the UNIX world like a veritable colossus with two-thirds of the market. The news of a possible deal has set a cat among the pigeons with worries about what this might mean for the future of Java and how it would have an impact on the open source community. It also fuelled rumors about a takeover of Red Hat by Oracle.

If IBM does go ahead and buy Sun, it would radically transform the enterprise server landscape. Beyond that it would have significant ramifications on the open source world. One wonders what would happen to StarOffice/OpenOffice considering that Big Blue has its own variant with Lotus Symphony which is based on an older OpenOffice code base. How would mySQL, acquired by Sun, fit alongside IBM’s DB2?

On the browser front, five days after its release, IE8 has doubled its share of Web browser usage from 1.3% to 2.6%. Now that’s not a lot but it’s not bad either when you consider that IE8 has not yet been made available through Windows Update at which point its market share will move upwards significantly. At this point, compatibility issues with many popular Web sites remain. IE8 is more standards compliant than IE7 or IE6 which creates problems as Web developers have got used to catering to the non-standard rendering of these two browsers. While you can always use the compatibility view feature of IE8 to render Web sites designed for the older versions, it can be disconcerting to load a familiar site and see it in a new and mostly unusable light.

Meanwhile, as if it wasn’t bad enough that computer networks are vulnerable, computer equipment used in the US power grid has been found to be vulnerable to attack said researchers at IOActive. Smart power switches known as the Smart Grid that have been deployed in millions (two million so far, 17 million more to come) can be hacked. These are computers that are hooked up to the power grid and let consumers and utilities both establish firmer control on electricity usage. This is a lesson to other countries including ours that will eventually have to resort to similar equipment to control and manage power consumption.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com