Unite or Face Irrelevance

Three years into the downturn in technology stocks, there is still nothing like a real recovery in sight. But here's a hopeful, if largely unnoticed, sign: last May, Sun Microsystems and Red Hat, which markets a version of the Linux operating system, announced that they would distribute each other's products worldwide. It's a step in the right direction, but what we really need is for those two companies, along with Apple Computer, to merge into a hardware-and-software colossus.

Ralph Rodriguez (former executive managing director of technology at Nomura Securities International) writes in the July issue of IEEE Spectrum that the technology sector clearly needs something spectacular to set it on the path to robust recovery, and a Sun-Apple-Red Hat merge would fit the bill. One of the brightest visions of the future of computing is built around the idea of grid computing, in which people will use the Internet to access geographically scattered computers, including extremely powerful clusters of computers. Computer power will become a utility of sorts, with users buying as much as they need for their tasks precisely when they need it. A merged Sun-Apple-Red Hat would be in a position to offer a deeply compelling vision of grid computing, based on a sort of super platform that the three would produce and that could seamlessly span the grid, from the desktop all the way to blazingly fast Internet clusters.