Jonathan Schwartz (No Relation) Says IBM Is In A Pickle

Preface: For my readers who are not native English speakers, the idiom "in a pickle" means "in trouble". Don't ask me why! (m-w.com attributes the phrase to Robert Louis Stevenson.) Also: I can state with total confidence that I am not related to Jonathan Schwartz, because the last name Schwartz was a pseudonym adopted by my father's father and I know the relatively small family tree that has developed since then doesn't include Sun Microsystems' COO.

Anyhow, Jonathan Schwartz believes that IBM's Linux play is reminiscent of their deal with Microsoft in the early 80s. Is it really? I think not. The giveaway is his comment "Nice tree for IBM Global Services, ugly forest for IBM." He's missing (or deliberately ignoring) the fact that IBM's strategy of making Global Services by far the biggest tree in their forest, and that IBM is happy to commoditize Global Services' complements, including the OS, and even the application server.

I do think, however, that he does make some good observations, particularly about IBM's relationship with SuSe/Novell being something to watch carefully. This business of commoditizing complements can be a tightrope walk in even the easist circumstances, and one thing I've learned about IBM over the years is that it is far from as monolithic as most people think it is. One patent filing, or one acquisition by one brand of one division of the company, could do a lot of damage to IBM's overall relationship with the open source community. Right now, SCO is the designated enemy of open source, but the open source world is fickle. And that does rhyme with pickle.

Update: A CNet article casts a slightly different light on Jonathan Schwartz's remarks. It seems that Sun is considering buying Novell as a defensive move against IBM. But a blog posting making IBM out to be the potential bad-guy to the open source movement, versus Sun as the good guy?... Come on! That strains credulity just a bit, don'cha think?

Further Update: El Reg knows what Jonathan Schwartz is up to. (via Volker)