Is Schmidt the set-up pitcher for an Apple-Sun merger? - MarketWatch

Apple is looking to make a splash in the server market to solidify its position there, but it does not have the credibility of a Dell, HP, IBM or a Sun despite the quality of its offerings, and it would love to grow that very profitable side of the business. Sun is positioned to make another run at server dominance as this is written, thanks to its superstar engineer and co-founder Andreas von Bechtolsheim.

There are a lot of reasons I don't buy this theory at all (the fact that Dvorak wrote it is one of them), but the idea that Apple's looking to "make a splash in the server market" is a big one.

Apple's server business exists as a way to provide a complete solution sale to their core markets: design and media, education, and scientific computing. That the same basic boxes and server software might be attractive for general enterprise computing is incidental. Apple's not interested in the enterprise market that is bread and butter for Sun, HP, Dell, and IBM (and Microsoft and Red Hat).

In fact, this would be a match between an enterprise computing non-entity, and a company whose trajectory in enterprise computing has been largely downward for the past five years. The only thing this marriage would do is cut Apple's stock price in half and make HP + Compaq look good by comparison.