Can you combine the engineer-centric, we-put-the-dot-in-dot-com kids from the West Coast with the button-down, eye-on-the-bottom-line grownups from the East? Well, maybe opposites attract.

IBM’s major strength is the range of things they can offer a customer – everything from business consulting to HW to SW to financing. IBM can provide full solutions, with emphasis on the word ‘full’. This is very attractive to customers, particularly for mission-critical solutions. IBM has corrected many of their historic weakness: being too closed to non-IBM products, being slow to market with competitive products, and pricing their offerings way too high. However, like any one, they can do better. The key thing to keep in mind is that IBM (and HP too) are playing different games than Sun and Dell. IBM is playing for ‘account control’, which means they want to be in a position where they are the tech go-to guy for their customers and can easily sell a broad range of their products and services into an enterprise. Sun and Dell, although they have aspirations for account control, are still locked in the ‘selling stuff’ model.  To play the account control game, you have to be able to satisfy every customer need and desire with items from your own shelves. This doesn’t mean that you, as IBM or HP, need to have your own brand of everything from KVM switches to ERP software; it simply means that you have to have the ability to help customers get anything they want through you. IBM and HP have the heft to do this; Sun and Dell do not. To be fair, both Sun and Dell counter with a ‘best of breed’ approach that was very popular in the 90s, but which has been waning ever since.

Sun’s major strength was their ability to develop compelling products and get them to market quickly. This fueled much of their rise during the tech boom of the 90s. However, this ability has faded over the past several years, with their rhetoric sometimes overpowering their ability to deliver. Sun’s strategy of becoming an open source SW provider, and riding that to higher HW sales, has clearly failed. The company has almost continually shrunk since the turn of the century, while their competitors have grown. This isn’t to say that there’s not a lot of value in Sun; there is. But the company has continually missed the boat in terms of capitalizing on it – exactly the kind of mistake their potential new Overlords in Armonk very rarely make.