Seriously, outside of some telcos and some pharmas who used Itanium by the truck load? How many people actually used Itanium? Everyone I've talked to says they have some but not too many. Every hardware vendor except for HP has walked away from Itanium. Updates for HP UX have come out periodically, but I don't believe they've been as frequent as AIX, Solaris, definitely not popular Linux distributions like RHEL and SuSE, or for that matter Windows. When Microsoft killed support for Itanium a while back, there were minimal complaints. When Red Hat killed support for Itanium (but still has support for ZLinux on the Mainframe), but minimal complaints about that. When Oracle killed support for the Mainframe a little while back, where were the complaints about that? Why now? I believe it's because it's easy to hate Oracle because they're really good at what they do. But, surprise...they've done it for years. Why the sudden outcry now? Because they're too large? Why no complaints about IBM or SAP? Or are they just poor victims in all of this?
Microsoft isn't much better. They own all the corporate desktop environments and are expanding from their SMB space to becoming very competitive in HPC/Grid and large enterprises (for enterprise deployments i.e. where your IBM and Oracle type companies ususally play).
Is Google any better? They're building a data management monopoly from all the weather maps on almost every cable network I've seen in the US to owning search and advertisement to their revamped attempt at social networking (Google Buzz) to their Android based Java fragmenting technology, which is closed and bit off Sun Micro code. I'm pretty sure they'll own data on just about everyone in the world in a matter of years if they haven't already done so.
Everyone used to complain about Sun's technologies. Everyone complained that Sun was old, proprietary, etc. Forget SPARC, what about all their open source software technology? (For the record, SPARC wasn't proprietary when Sun owned SPARC. The SPARC instruction set is published as IEEE Standard 1754-1994. They also open sourced their chips on opensparc.net.
How many people actually embraced them and cut an check because they truly believed in open source? Does anyone remember Open Solaris, Open DS, OpenSSO, Java SE being GPL'd, Sun Grid Engine? How many customers actually deployed them and actually paid for its support? How many companies actually paid for MySQL Support despite all the increased investment that Sun put into MySQL to improve its scalability and create a non-Oracle owned IP based storage engine? How many people bought into the Sun Greenplum datawarehouse, which at the time was based on PostgreSQL, Solaris, and ZFS, esp as an Oracle/IBM alternative to keep costs down i.e. multi-vendor strategy? People forget that vendors like Oracle tried to make SPARC irrelevant despite very strong relationships in the past by relegating them to tier two or three or reduced or non-support. Sun fought like crazy to keep itself afloat by creating non-proprietary alternatives. In fact, I remember Scott McNealy came to town for an customer dinner and his whole pitch was about lower the barrier to entry and exit for customers and how open sourcing the technology, and complete indemnification from Sun to its customers would protect us as customers from acquisitions or a potential Sun bankruptcy.
How many companies and individuals posting jumped on Sun's strategy despite their rhetoric about "how %choose your proprietary vendor" is the devil?" Hell they even open-sourced their chip and had a few derivative chips created by third parties as a result. Obviously it was very few, because the Sun business model of open-source software with free licensing and paid support subsidized by hardware sales failed miserably because few people bought into it to sustain them any further.
What it comes down to, is your app and DB vendors (regardless of whether it is IBM, Oracle, ISV or boutique app ISVs) own your IT environment because you're scared of risking the stuff that makes you money in favor of some philosophical position. Sure world peace sounds great, but not if my taxes are going up or if my jobs are being outsourced, right?
You get what you pay for and large enterprise companies (who drive a ton or revenue that actually gains some profit as opposed to HPC outfits that drive a lot of revenue but very little profit) as a whole have opted to pay for traditional enterprise IT companies that can provide them infrastructure, some key business-tied application ISVs, a lot of in-house code, and a guaranteed support model. I think everyone hammers on SPARC (and given its more recent history, don't say I blame them), but the reality is that servers (regardless of vendor or architecture) are relatively minimal in cost of the entire IT stack. Software (Business, Virt, Management), Storage costs, facilities, and labor related costs are much higher than your servers. Servers just happen to be the most obvious and transparent way we spend money on IT. The one notable exception is Red Hat.
But Red Hat is a smaller company and there is a lot of IT vendor consolidation going on. Someone above stated that the key reason why everyone loves them is because of their hardware neutral position. I completely agree with them. I think their support is hit or miss. Sometimes you get an awesome person, sometimes you don't. They're not always adopting the latest and greatest kernels, but hey - they're commercial, I can get some sort of support to at least offer an internal support resolution SLA (or client facing), they're popular, they're growing and I'm not the only one doing it (i.e. I won't be fired for making the switch if something fails).
But with the IT consolidation going on, and the larger IT vendors trying to improve their standing vs IBM and Oracle, who are clearly the ones to beat from a complete stack perspective, HP, Dell, SAP, VMWare, Cisco, and EMC have all been either acquiring companies or creating partnerships. How long does Red Hat have? I don't have a crystal ball, but I can totally see the following companies trying to increase their respective value proposition to customers:
-Dell buying Red Hat because, they're just a low-cost hardware vendor. Even if you don't want them, people throw them into RFPs just to keep the price down.
-HP buying Red Hat for and OS/virt capability in the x86 space that can possibly expand into Itanium, WebOS spaces.
-SAP buying Red Hat to round out their OLTP database, BIDW, CEP, mobile computing, business apps, and virtualization spaces.
-IBM could possibly buy Red Hat for the same reasons as HP i.e. have a better value prop in the x86 space and have a one low OS option for all their tiers i.e. x86, Power, Mainframe.
Not saying it will happen, but there is room for it.